I experience sudden reboots with no warning at all, in most direct 3d accelerated games / diagnostic utilities, after a period ranging from 20 seconds to a minute.

the reboot occurs earlier in 32 bit than 16 bit colour mode (I think)
also, there is a little horizontal flicker as if the refresh rate has fallen a little just prior to the reboot, lasting about a second or two.

interestingly, if I alt tab out of the application to windows whilst it is flickering, the reboot does not occur (or if i close the utility)

also, the reboot does not occur with the applications running minimized in the background, ie it has to be on screen to happen

I'm using a diamond viper v770 non ultra (nvidia TNT2) on the following board : gigabyte 686-lx4 based in the intel 440 LX chipset.

I've tried reinstalling direct X, and various versions of direct X, taking out all my other peripheral devices and cards, and even reinstalling windows, to no avail

in my desperation I even contacted diamond customer service, which naturally got me nowhere. currently, their tech support guy is telling me that video bios cannot be flashed (I asked him for a copy of the default factory shipped bios to reset my bios to that, in case their revised bios had destabilised the card)

I am now turning to this board for help.

does anyone know what the problem is? I don't get a blue screen, or a hang, or any warning from windows at all, just - blam - and it reboots. of late since updating my motherboard drivers from intel and not windows, I now experience unexpected lock ups in windows too, everything just freezes. ctrl alt del fails most of the time, and occasionally I can stlil move my mouse but the computer speaker makes little buzzing noise with every mouse move or click i make, and keypresses dont work, nor does clicking anywhere. i just get to move my mouse

please advise! diamond technical support has been dismal, and to make things worse my card is still under warranty and their website promises that hardware faults will be replaced, or repaired.

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