Quake3World

Hello, help!
My main board beeps, more often than not, just after the main switch is on.
After the internet research about this kind of beep, it turned out to be a problem of gfx card.
Sometimes there occurs no beeps and OSes boot up properly but system suddenly becomes quite unstable.
i.e.
1) secondary master(dvd drive) and slave(3rd hard drive) suddenly reject to be functional
2) while playing quake3 arena, screen suddenly freezes and no response which forces bad way of shutdown

Do I have to buy a new card?
Or is there anything which could be tried as a common solution?
Thank you for your interest.

first -check bios for your cpu and motherboard temperatures and post the temps here
second -remove all pci cards and test comp ..if it still fails unplug dvd and or cd drive and secondary hard drive if any ..test comp

-make sure all cards are plugged in tight
-make sure fans spin and no gunk on the fan /heatsync on cpu and vid card
-try comp with bios defaults
-try with setup defaults

Thank you axbaby for your help.
I just remember geforce3 was somewhat hotter than ever before when I previously touched it accidentally.
After reading your post, I opened my case and checked if the fan on geforce3 is actually spinning around or not.

Oh, the fan was freezed.
Correctly its axis is stained and rusty.
It was a bit unbelievable.
Can this often happen? :?

Anyway I splattered oil around the axis and see if system can boot in nice cases out of ten and keep stability.
It seems the problem has just gone.

It is regretable that, ignoring the warning, I keep using this hot PC for long, which might have already given some critical unrecoverable damages.
(edit: It seems not so much damage has been given.)

Additionally other supposedly disordered devices in the past a few years, such as dvd/cdrw drive, memory and sound card, which have been unattached and re-attached again for checking, now re-work again.
It is quite fun that such a tiny fan on geforce 3 has significant influence.
(edit: It seems stopped fan simply stopeed boot process.)
BTW my 4 years old geforce 3 has 7 years of warranty.
Thank you again. :icon25:

[edit]
After additional survey, I reached the following conclusion.

Hard drive attached to secondary slave has been semi-failed(maybe axis failure, rather than surface defects) and it caused random secondary ide problem which has nothing to do with gfx card.
Downgrading to spair drive solved the problem, maybe. :icon3:
After all it can be said that all the suspicious devices are still electronically reliable, in fact, they are simply matters of their related axises.

If you read this topic, you might think that replacing all devices, say, buying a new PC would be better.
But it's too late now.
This PC contains quite a bit of OSes and their sys configs(including local networks) are now comfortable and inevitable if not all of them are used in a daily basis.
And I love this PC and I still leave what needs to be accomplished with this PC. :evil:
I really regret that I didn't purchase one more geforce3 and intel 815EP chipset which are not easily found these days.

i had a mouse disguise itself as a total system failure acting like a bad cpu or motherboard.
i replaced everything
computers are funny


glad to help

axbaby wrote: i replaced everything

That's too bad.