I am having a problem with my PC hanging / locking up shortly after it boots into windows following the instillation of my 3rd video card (GeForce 9500 GT) and I believe I have narrowed the problem down to BOINC, though this doesn’t help since the reason only thing this system really does is BOINC.
The system is a Xeon 2.8GHz dual CPU server board (SE7501BR2) with 1Gig RAM, 2 GeForce 9500GTs (1Gig edition) running the latest drivers (266.58), WinXP x32 SP3, and BOINC (6.10.58).
The system has been very stable running 24/7 in the above configuration for months. Earlier today I installed a 3rd GPU and the system booted w/o problems; windows recognizes the 3rd card and BOINC begins to use it, everything appears to be ok but ~2 min after boot the system freezes (becomes completely unresponsive) and I have to perform a hard reboot. The system appears to be running a program/s or process after everything us up and running because I can see a great deal of hard drive activity right up until the system freezes.
The problem only occurs when the 3rd video card is installed and is not dependant on which PCI slot the card is in or which of the 3 cards “is the 3rd” that is to say I have swapped the different cards around the found that it is not a specific card but only the presence of a 3rd card.
The problem does not appear to be a hardware issue per say since after playing around in msconfig I found that the system performs just fine with all 3 cards when boincmgr.exe and boinctray.exe are prevented from starting. I did not try to disable other processes to see if they were conflicting with BOINC but I did try all the other “Startup Items” and none of them appear to affect the problem.
BOINC does not give any error messages that I have found nor does windows, though I wouldn’t expect that it would be able to write any since the lockup happens so suddenly. Prior to the system freezing everything appears normal BOINC is even running and processing work units from SETI, Einstein, and MilkyWay.
At this point any suggestions would be very helpful since the point of installing the additional GPU was for BOINC and therefore disabling either BOINC or the GPU would be counter productive.
Thanks


Incase anyone is interested here are the only messages listed in BOINC before the system freezes

1/24/2011 9:43:53 PM Starting BOINC client version 6.10.58 for windows_intelx86
1/24/2011 9:43:53 PM log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task
1/24/2011 9:43:53 PM Libraries: libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8l zlib/1.2.3
1/24/2011 9:43:53 PM Data directory: C:\BOINC-Data
1/24/2011 9:43:53 PM Running under account R Edward Frampton
1/24/2011 9:43:54 PM Processor: 4 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz [Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 7]
1/24/2011 9:43:54 PM Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss htt tm pbe
1/24/2011 9:43:54 PM OS: Microsoft Windows XP: Professional x86 Edition, Service Pack 3, (05.01.2600.00)
1/24/2011 9:43:54 PM Memory: 1023.46 MB physical, 2.41 GB virtual
1/24/2011 9:43:54 PM Disk: 18.64 GB total, 7.74 GB free
1/24/2011 9:43:54 PM Local time is UTC -5 hours
1/24/2011 9:43:58 PM NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce 9500 GT (driver version 26658, CUDA version 3020, compute capability 1.1, 1024MB, 86 GFLOPS peak)
1/24/2011 9:43:58 PM NVIDIA GPU 1: GeForce 9500 GT (driver version 26658, CUDA version 3020, compute capability 1.1, 1024MB, 86 GFLOPS peak)
1/24/2011 9:43:58 PM NVIDIA GPU 2: GeForce 9500 GT (driver version 26658, CUDA version 3020, compute capability 1.1, 1024MB, 86 GFLOPS peak)
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM Einstein@Home URL http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/; Computer ID 3526513; resource share 0
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM Milkyway@home URL http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/; Computer ID 217899; resource share 0
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM SETI@home URL http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/; Computer ID 3935340; resource share 100
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM uFluids URL http://www.ufluids.net/; Computer ID 124206; resource share 0
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM General prefs: from http://bam.boincstats.com/ (last modified 27-Sep-2010 13:47:49)
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM Computer location: home
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM General prefs: no separate prefs for home; using your defaults
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM Reading preferences override file
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM Preferences:
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM max memory usage when active: 767.59MB
1/24/2011 9:43:59 PM max memory usage when idle: 1023.46MB
1/24/2011 9:44:04 PM max disk usage: 8.68GB
1/24/2011 9:44:04 PM (to change preferences, visit the web site of an attached project, or select Preferences in the Manager)
1/24/2011 9:44:06 PM Not using a proxy
1/24/2011 9:44:28 PM Einstein@Home Restarting task PM0014_05131.dm_280_1 using einsteinbinary_BRP3 version 105
1/24/2011 9:44:31 PM SETI@home Restarting task 05se10aa.22680.60429.9.10.94.vlar_1 using setiathome_enhanced version 603
1/24/2011 9:44:35 PM SETI@home Restarting task 27mr10aa.4398.198188.10.10.57_2 using setiathome_enhanced version 609
1/24/2011 9:44:35 PM SETI@home Restarting task 05se10aa.22680.61247.9.10.219.vlar_1 using setiathome_enhanced version 603
1/24/2011 9:44:35 PM SETI@home Restarting task 27au10ac.30272.4162.3.10.252_2 using setiathome_enhanced version 609
1/24/2011 9:44:35 PM SETI@home Restarting task 27au10ac.30272.4162.3.10.250_2 using setiathome_enhanced version 609
here are the global_prefs
<global_preferences>
<source_project>http://bam.boincstats.com/</source_project>
<mod_time>1285609669</mod_time>
<cpu_scheduling_period_minutes>60</cpu_scheduling_period_minutes>
<idle_time_to_run>3</idle_time_to_run>
<suspend_if_no_recent_input>0</suspend_if_no_recent_input>
<work_buf_min_days>0.1000000</work_buf_min_days>
<work_buf_additional_days>2.0000000</work_buf_additional_days>
<max_cpus>2</max_cpus>
<max_ncpus_pct>100</max_ncpus_pct>
<cpu_usage_limit>100</cpu_usage_limit>
<suspend_cpu_usage>0</suspend_cpu_usage>
<disk_interval>60</disk_interval>
<disk_max_used_gb>50.0</disk_max_used_gb>
<disk_max_used_pct>75</disk_max_used_pct>
<disk_min_free_gb>5.0</disk_min_free_gb>
<vm_max_used_pct>75</vm_max_used_pct>
<ram_max_used_busy_pct>75</ram_max_used_busy_pct>
<ram_max_used_idle_pct>100</ram_max_used_idle_pct>
<max_bytes_sec_down>0</max_bytes_sec_down>
<max_bytes_sec_up>0</max_bytes_sec_up>
<start_hour>0</start_hour>
<end_hour>0</end_hour>
<net_start_hour>0</net_start_hour>
<net_end_hour>0</net_end_hour>
<run_if_user_active>1</run_if_user_active>
<run_gpu_if_user_active/>
<run_on_batteries/>
</global_preferences>
And the globa_prefs.overide
<global_preferences>
<run_on_batteries>1</run_on_batteries>
<run_if_user_active>1</run_if_user_active>
<run_gpu_if_user_active>1</run_gpu_if_user_active>
<suspend_cpu_usage>0.000000</suspend_cpu_usage>
<start_hour>0.000000</start_hour>
<end_hour>0.000000</end_hour>
<net_start_hour>0.000000</net_start_hour>
<net_end_hour>0.000000</net_end_hour>
<leave_apps_in_memory>0</leave_apps_in_memory>
<confirm_before_connecting>0</confirm_before_connecting>
<hangup_if_dialed>0</hangup_if_dialed>
<dont_verify_images>0</dont_verify_images>
<work_buf_min_days>0.000000</work_buf_min_days>
<work_buf_additional_days>2.000000</work_buf_additional_days>
<max_ncpus_pct>100.000000</max_ncpus_pct>
<cpu_scheduling_period_minutes>9999.000000</cpu_scheduling_period_minutes>
<disk_interval>60.000000</disk_interval>
<disk_max_used_gb>50.000000</disk_max_used_gb>
<disk_max_used_pct>75.000000</disk_max_used_pct>
<disk_min_free_gb>0.000000</disk_min_free_gb>
<vm_max_used_pct>95.000000</vm_max_used_pct>
<ram_max_used_busy_pct>75.000000</ram_max_used_busy_pct>
<ram_max_used_idle_pct>100.000000</ram_max_used_idle_pct>
<max_bytes_sec_up>0.000000</max_bytes_sec_up>
<max_bytes_sec_down>0.000000</max_bytes_sec_down>
<cpu_usage_limit>100.000000</cpu_usage_limit>
<daily_xfer_limit_mb>0.000000</daily_xfer_limit_mb>
<daily_xfer_period_days>0</daily_xfer_period_days>
</global_preferences>

Its gotta be your power supply dude, when those GPUS's kick in to 3D mode they're gonna draw alot more power than sitting at your desktop. As the other poster also stated you seem to be short on memory, getting at least a 4GB package would help keep you out of the swap file and additional IO processing,

Also do not let BOINC autostart at bootup, launch BOINC manually after the system has booted....BOINC can put a tremendous strain on other boot-startup processes......Get SYSINTERNALS utilities and use Autoruns to manage your startup programs with. It requires saving anything you uncheck within the Autoruns program which saves it to a file in your root DIR.

You could also try updating your BOINC version to at least 6.12.26......I haven't yet installed the 6.12.33 version yet.

And I have encountered an ATI driver issue with CCC 11.6 failing WU's causing Computation Errors.

So you're put 3 One Gig GPU's in a system that runs 32bit Windows, and you you expect the System RAM to be accessable too?

Memory Limits for Windows Releases

You can try enabling the PAE switch, and see if that improves matters:

Physical Address Extension - PAE Memory and Windows

Or try a 64bit OS (If possible), then it will be able to address more than 3 Gig,

Claggy