Hi

A few days ago I tried to install FlightGear (flight simulator using OpenGL), and everything went okay and it worked right away, using the latest NVidia driver on the latest 2.6 kernel.

Later that day it would no longer run, resulting in a complete system freeze, no keyboard or mouse response, but it appears to only freeze when it's about to begin play, loading screens (which are done in OpenGL) are always displayed.

After that, i've tried everything, switched drivers, kernels and even reverted from slackware 10.2 to 10, using default kernel and some olddrivers I had stored that i'm sure they worked in the past, and it still freezes.

Also during all this, i ran glxgears a lot, with several outcomes:
freezing the system
instanteneously rebooting the system
and in the same session alternate between working and segfaulting

glxinfo reported everything normally.

Using the "nv" (unaccelerated) driver, glxgears worked well

I've already ran memtest during ~2h30 and no errors were found.

I also found that running (in Windows) the SiSoft Sandra's Memory Bandwidth Benchmark resulted in a system freeze. All other benchmarks went OK.

Other than that the systems appears normal, Q3 in Windows runs fine.

Note: when i say "freeze" it's total freeze, no mouse moving, no numlock toggling, no console switching.

I'm lead to believe i have a hardware flaw, but where?
What diagnosis programs should i run?
Any ideas?


Thanks in advance


Giga-byte 7VTXE+ (KT266)
Duron 1200
512 MB DDR
Aureal Vortex2
2xRealTek 8139
Seagate 40GB

System freezing usual causes:

CPU over heat
RAM flaw (could be that it just needs reseating)
Graphics card over heating
Motherboard on its way out.

Just some ideas.

SiSoft Sandra has a PC Burn In feature which I've used in Windows to diagnose faults like this and can be very handy.