Here's a good article on PSU's.

I think the PSU as the weak link is right on the money. My cpu temp stabilizes at 58c with prime95 which is good. I removed every unecessary device to reduce power consumption and prime95 and far cry ran a lot longer before crashing. I've ordered a new PSU that doubles my +12v amps. Thanks for the help from all of you. You're a great bunch.

Aha! Thought so!

I WAS going to suggest you disconnect everything unnecessary, mainly your 6 USB devices, since each one can draw up to 0.5A (500mA), which is 6 x 0.5 = 3A total. However, you've beaten me to it! Good logical deduction there!

I was ALSO going to suggest that you upgrade your PSU anyway, but you've beaten me to it AGAIN! You're getting good at this, you know? LOL!

My heartfelt thanks for your thanks and I'm always happy to help a fellow Far Cry nut, my friend!

Yeah, the guys here are top notch!
Sorry your having problems, but it's nice to see someone who takes the time to troubleshoot and not just bash UBI and Crytek. Even though the game is a pig it's not always the game that's problem.

@pakmanis

Yea, Cupid, pray loose thine arrow that it smitest mine almighty skull muscle, and deflatest thus, mine doors needst be widened not! LOL!
Just to be contrary... UBI! Crytek!

Cheers, my friend!

Received my 550W Apire Chameleon power supply today. +12v @36A. All tests pass with flying colors. CPU and whole system runs cooler. Far Cry runs great with no problems at 1024x768 resolution even with the GeForce FX 5700 LE. Hmmm, maybe I now have enough power to upgrade my video card.

Nice to hear!

Trivial little tidbit on the A7N8X's is not to run case fans from the MB header but rather the psu directly.

@scheval

Glad to know you got it sorted at last, my friend.

I hate spouting "I told you so's", but, (gleefully) I TOLD YOU SO!

+12V @ 36A? 120mm LED fan? UV reactive cables? WOW! That's one kick*** powerful and sexy looking PSU!

Obviously, you now that have PLENTY of power to run a GeForce 6800 Ultra, which will run Far Cry in ALL it's SM3.0 and HDR glory!

The 6800 is a little out of my budget. But I think I'll bump up to a 6600 GT AGP. But I may have declared victory too soon, Far Cry took a dump on me again. Prime95 crashed with a program error. The problem has changed on me (I hate that). Even though Memtest runs good I am going to remove the memory and CPU, blow any dust out of the slots and sockets, clean the gold on the DIMMS and reseat everything. Pretty flaky problem .... I hope inadequate power didn't damage a component but I suppose it's possible. What is the problem with running case fans from the mobo connector? The one case fan I have connected to the mobo connector seems to work fine and the rpms register Ok with MBM.

I am not familiar with that board but, in general, running the fans from the motherboard means that they take power from the mobo. Running off a molex connector takes power directly from the PSU and does not put further load on the motherboard.

Do you leave the rpm sensor wire connected or do you lose that capability?

Ran Hot CPU tester Pro 4 (Lite Edition) for 35 min w/zero errors. Ran 3DMark03 for one complete pass with zero errors. Ran Seti@Home for 30 min w/ zero errors. Prime95 generates a "Program Error" and Windows closes it. Possibly because I am running Windows 2000 and this is the latest version? Far Cry still locks up. Did not tear into my hardware yet (If it ain't broke don't fix it). I think I'll try to substitute the ASUS nForce drivers for the nVidia nForce drivers to see if that helps.

@scheval

Here's a theory...

I've known systems that have been overrunning their PSU's to suffer from subsequent hard disk problems, usually in the form of "weak" sectors. These are the result of the disk read/write head field strength operating at a low level due to insufficient power, leading to "weak" magnetic flux density on the disk surface. These weak areas can show up as BAD sectors MONTHS or even YEARS later as the flux density gradually decays.

Best advice? Run CHKDSK with the Surface Scan option enabled, to check ALL sectors. It takes quite a while, but it will attempt to repair any bad sectors it finds. Also, it's a pain to do, but LISTEN to the hard disk activity as CHKDSK runs. You'll hear a "chunking" sound every time CHKDSK repeatedly tries to access a "borderline" bad sector. CHKDSK can "pass" a sector as OK if it manages to read it within a retry limit. However, if it retries more than once, I would consider that sector UNRELIABLE!

Better still, see if you can find any software on the web that does NON-destructive formatting, i.e. reading data from each track in turn, reformatting the track, and copying the track data back again. This will "regenerate" the disk surface, bringing the magnetic flux in any "weak" sectors back to full strength.

Failing that, the only way to be ABSOLUTELY sure is to "regenerate" the hard disk surface the HARD way, by starting from scratch, i.e. repartitioning, reformatting and reinstalling EVERYTHING.

If the trouble is bad sector's forget about scandisc fixin it.Also if it is bad sector's you will start lockin up in more then just farcry.If you see a message,if you can catch it,just after the scan and it say's you have bad sector's I do have a program that will fix them.If so PM me if you want and we'll see about sending you the progy.

As far as the fan goes.... I suppose the sensor would work, but I never done it myself.

Couple of things to try;
- underclocking the cpu and ram to 333mhz.

- relaxing mem timings to 3-3-3-11.

- single channel mode

I suppose I could just restore my disk from a previous image I burned onto multiple DVD's, assuming the sectors were not corrupted when it was made. I also have posted an inquiry on the ASUS forum that I was previously refered to by pakmanis. It seem that there has been as issue with ide drivers when using nVidia nForce unified drivers for some systems, but I think it was with Win XP not 2000. I may go back to the last nForce drivers that were posted on the ASUS website just to be safe. Another possibility is that when I went to the 160GB hard drive, instead of installing Win 2000 from scratch I did a clone from my previous drive to the 160 gig formatted as 137GB (Windows 2000 limit), edited the registry to allow for 48 bit LBA and then used a partitioning program to change the drive to full capacity. I've heard that the process can sometimes corrupt Windows. I have been trying to avoid reinstalling from scratch because it can take me weeks to recover. The test results do seem to indicate that the CPU, memory, etc is OK. The drive, controller, or data on the drive seems to be all that's left. Know of any good diagnostic software for hammering hard drives? I have SiSoft Sandra, I'll try that first.

I just linked to a couple of HDD bench and diagnostic programs that I have used in another post. See here.

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=400102&f=170106891&m=1351050203

HDtach

Did you read this at nforcershq.com?
Quote from the OC for newbies tutorial:

"You can test the stability of your system by running Prime95's torture test. If your system cannot pass several hours of Prime95, that means:

You need to raise vCore and/or vDimm voltages

You need to relax/tune your memory timings

You have reached the max clock (or "hit the wall") of your CPU

Your CPU is running hot, causing instability

Your Northbridge could be overheating, causing instability

You have reached the max FSB for the motherboard/memory/CPU

If you are experiencing 3DMark crashes with higher fsb's, this is most likely caused by the Northbridge getting too hot or insufficient VDD voltage to the Chipset. You can also try upping the AGP Voltage and turning off Fastwrites/8xAGP in BIOS."

I know your not OCing and the board is supposed to run at 400mhz. Try underclocking to 333mhz. If you can run prime95 that would most likely rule out a hardrive fault and point to the MB itself or bios settings.

Here's my BIOS

1.CPU External Frequency 200MHz
2.CPU Frequency Multiple Setting Auto
3.CPU Frequency Multiple 11.0x
4.System Performance Optimal
5.CPU Interface Optimal
6.Memory Frequency Auto
7.Resulting Frequency Auto
8.Memory Timings Optimal
9.SDRAM Active Precharge Delay 8
10.SDRAM RAS to CAS Delay 3
11.SDRAM RAS Precharge Delay 3
12.SDRAM Latency 3T
13.FSB Spread Spectrum Disabled
14.AGP Spread Spectrum Disabled
15.CPU Vcore Setting Auto
16.CPU Vcore 1.650v
17.Graphics Aperture Size 64MB
18.AGP Frequency Auto
19.System BIOS Cacheable Disabled
20.Video BIOS Cacheable Disabled
21.DDR Reference Voltage 2.6v
22.AGP VDDQ Voltage 1.5v
23.AGP 8x Support Enabled
24.AGP Fast Write Capability Disabled

As you can see they're conservative settings. To save typing I'll refer to them by number. I disabled #24 per your suggestion for testing. When I change #6 to "By SPD" #7 changes to 200MHz as it should be (FSB). When I change #1 to 166MHz and #6 to "Auto" then #9 changes to "7" and #12 changes to 2.5T, which is the actual CAS Latency specs for this particular memory. It is Crucial PC3200 memory. When I change #1 to 166MHz, CPU speed is 1838MHz. When #1 is 200MHz, CPU speed is 220MHz which this processor is rated for. When I dropped #1 to 166MHz I successfully ran Prime95 through the first three tests. That's farther than I have been able to run before. I had no more time to test this weekend, too busy. I'll post after I run Prime95 longer at the lower clock speed. HDTach showed that my HD failed the spinup test. Will test with HDTune next. Buts it's under warranty, I'll tackle that later. During Prime95 my CPU stabilizes at 59C and the MB at 32c. Maybe a little warm but I don't think it's too hot, do you? I'll reslime the heatsink and reseat it. Maybe I'll look into a water cooler for it. Do you see any obvious problems with the BIOS settings?

The fact that HD tach failed the spin up test is concerning (when I run it, it only shows burst, cpu, random, and sequential tests. Then it shows a graph that basically shows how bad my 2 x 40GB drives suck compared to 3 other über drives).

To take a step back... do you run Spybot, adaware (or the removal tool of your choice) and defrag on a regular basis? Always good things .

As far as the bios settings;
set #18 to 66mhz.

set #6 to "by spd" and make sure #7 is 200mhz.

(If you try to underclock set #1 to 166mhz and #6 to "by spd" and make sure #7 is 166mhz.)

If your passing memtest then the timings "should" be okay.

Set #6/7 and #18 but look into the harddrive probs before underclocking.