I purchased a PCchips m805lr motherboard about 6 months ago along with a 750tbird cpu, and riva tnt2 32m video card. Originally I installed 128m pc133 ram.
I\'m an avid online gamer, and immediately began to run into problems with my pc locking up on me while playing my graphic intensive games. It was totally random, sometimes It would lock up 5 times in a single hour, sometimes I could go a week of gaming without a lockup.
The first thing I did was upgrade my bios, with no effect. Next, I added another 256M stick of memory, again pc133 due to the chipset limitations with pc2100. I originally had DX 7.0, then upgraded to dx8, again no effect, except maybe it got a little worse.
I reloaded windows98, all drivers and original bios, and the problem persisted. Next, since all good games has great sound, I replaced my 3d sound card hoping that was the culprit. No change, so went to on-board sound emulators, still no change.
Assuming I had a crappy video card (Jaton) I just installed a new VisionTek geforce3 ti500 yesterday....and now I can\'t play any super graphic intensive game for more than 5 minutes without a total lockup. Sometimes I can\'t even load the game fully without locking up.
To stress, my pc never locks up \"unless\" I\'m doing hardcore graphics. One demo that comes with the geforce3 is a nifty game allowing fullscreen 2048x2048 with stunning graphics, and I can\'t get this program to run for longer than perhaps 1 minute before my pc locks up.
I hope somebody has some better advice than \"buy a new mboard\" which I suppose I\'m ultimately doomed to do. Guess this time no more generic stuff.
