Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
2 Posts
0
9946
July 9th, 2010 17:00
Alienware area 51 graphic problems - Ati card
Hello Im posting here in the hopes of seeing if anyone else has the same annoying problem I am having and to see if there is a fix for it. I have had my alienwaer for many years. It is old, the sticker on the back says it is an area51 but other that that really don't know any other model information on it. It has an older asus board inside with a 3.0ghz hyperthreaded p4 processor and Ati radeon 9700 agp card. Also has 1.25gb of ram inside.
Overall the machine seems sluggish, not the kind of sluggish from lots of junk installed, I have just recently reinstalled windows on the machine and even with a fresh copy of windows the machine struggles to jump from the pidgin instant messanger to internet explorer takes a good 10 seconds to switch and responses are sluggish. Overall the machine is rather slow despite its hardware specs, I have an anchient dell gx 100 that is performing better than this "gaming machine".
Apart from the overall sluggishness the machine crashes on a regular basis. I can be in the middle of a youtube video or playing a game of oblivion and the machine will tweak out,(screen flicker beep a couple of times), and then restart on the spot. This has been a big problem and frankly its makeing me debate on throwing the whole tower out. Im thinking its something related to the graphics card that is causing the prlems, sometimes if it is graceful enough to give me an error i get some ati crash info. The card works fine in other computers of mine so im thinking that its something specific to the alienware motherboard hardware / software.
Other than that it works... power supply caught on fire once(shocking to see, good thing i was home) (fan stopped, cooked everything in the power supply till smoke came out the back), which i switched out for a store bought 500watt model.
If anyone can point me in the right direction to getting this fixed it would save me alot, I love the alienware machine but in its current state it is getting to be unusable.
P.S wasnt sure if this was a tech help area, if not please point me in the right direction.
0 events found
Tesla1856
10 Wizard
•
17.6K Posts
•
70.1K Points
0
July 9th, 2010 19:00
No offence but that machine is pretty old ... not sure what you expect.
I have an old Dell 8200 with a P4-2.8ghz ... it will run a lean install of XP-32 decently, but that's about it. That's with an ATI x800 which is the next step up from your 9700. It should have a least 1gb of RAM to prevent excessive swapping.
I'm surprised Oblivion runs at all ... you must have the setting turned down. I installed MediaPortal on mine and gave it to my brother as a media server.
Troubleshoot it like any other PC. Do a clean install, try to only use the lite generic Microsoft drivers. The best video driver is probably an old one ... maybe from 2006 or so ... a couple of years after it was released around version 5-6. Keep the install really lean.
The crashing could be most anything ... from overheating (fans, worn thermal compound), worn/bad capacitors on the MB, flakey ram, or even software or virus. If there is a DOS level Diags for the old AW models, run that for a few hours. Hammer it with a benchmark program in Windows and see what happens and when. Have a friend that knows computers take a look at it. Or learn yourself on the Internet ... just treat it like a regular desktop that is broken.
devind0
2 Posts
0
July 9th, 2010 20:00
No offense taken I understand what you are saying, but there is something clearly wrong and it should be preforming better than it is concidering the hardware inside.
Apart from being slow and sluggish I have the view distance and shadows set to the lowest setting but everything else is set to high in oblivion and it runs fine till it crashes.
I think im just going to try and find an equivalant motherboard and see if swapping it out makes a difference. I have allready done most of the steps you listed, i did a fresh install and it was still sluggish and restarts, I have run memory tests with memtest86, there are no signs of bad/poped capacitors, and there is no virus. Thanks for the suggestins, just wanted to see if anyone knew of some kind of known problem with my motherboard / drivers/ video card.
Tesla1856
10 Wizard
•
17.6K Posts
•
70.1K Points
0
July 10th, 2010 00:00
Hopefully somone with an old model will chime in.
But if not ... I was serious about my repair suggestions. If either the CPU or GPU are not cooling properly, they will throttle back or even reset themselves. I think the CPU-z guys have a few different softwares that measure temp on those.
Also, if it crashes during DOS level diags, you will know it's the base hardware and not software/ drivers/ etc.
Good luck.
johnodd4
11 Posts
0
August 3rd, 2010 22:00
Ok i have a older model Area 51 Alienware which works just fine.
here are my system specs.
Alienware area 51
pentium 4 3.0 ghz processor
1 gig of ram
1tb hard drive
nvidia nforce 7200 gt 512meg graphics card.
running windows vista home basic
Listen up that model of alienware supports these DDR memory types
DDR 266mhz
DDR 333Mhz
DDR 400Mhz
the reason your machine is slowing down is you most likely have the single channel DDR 266Mhz installed
recommend upgraded memory to DDR 400Mhz dual channel memory
this will greatly speed up your machine by loads
also check the inside of your machine do you have a sata connector on your motherboard of your computer if so i recommend upgrading to a sata hard drive you will be better off speed wise.