Age of Empires won't run over 700mhz

[UThomas]

Ok, this is a weird one. Here is the deal:

I recently upgraded my CPU to an athlon 800 after previously running an athlon 500 overclocked to 700. AOE ran fine on the 500@700, but when I put the true 800 in it locks in games (screen freeze). So I underclocked the 800 to 750 and still no good. But running the 800 at 700 makes it run smooth as silk.

Whats going on and how do I fix it? The athlon 800 runs all my other games and stress tests fine even at 850 mhz, let alone 800 or 750. It runs fine on my friends machine at 750 (7x107) btw...

Thomas

 

[ericb]

Have you upgraded your video drivers and directx?

 

[UThomas]

Yes, but I've tried like every permutation of the things to get it to work. Nothing effects it but the CPU. And like a dozen other games including Shogun, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Homeworld, etc all run fine and have the whole time.

Thomas

 

[GuruMogens]

That's strange... I run it on 800mHZ....

 

[PCAddict]

Very strange...

What type of RAM do you have?

 

[UThomas]

2 128 sticks of matched Micron PC133 that have worked fine for about a year. This problem absolutely baffles me...

Thomas

 

[PCAddict]

That is indeed very strange. The only thing I can think of is that something is fubared with your motherboard that is causing a problem at that clock frequency. Maybe it's not enough to cause problems in other programs, but the AOE games have always tempermental at times for me as well.

What motherboard do you have?

 

[UThomas]

I've got the 1st KX133 board to market, the Epox one. This just kills me. Not only can I not cheat my way to some extra Mhz, I have to give up some I paid for! Maybe this is God's way of getting me for overclocking my last 2 processors. 🙂

Thomas

 

[PCAddict]

Try some more conservative BIOS settings if you haven't already.

I've found that I have to either reboot to recover lost RAM from memory leaks in order for A0E2/Conquerors to run properly, and I have 384 MB. I can sometimes achieve success by running a memory cleaning program that will reclaim some resources for me.

 

[UThomas]

I went in an set the latency to CAS3 (instead of Auto) and the ram banks to normal instead of fast. Still no luck. In fact, at 800 it hung trying to load a game and hung on the intro movie, which it has never done before.

I hate this... I got so mad I kicked my computer last week and it took scandisk an hour to fix 🙂 My computer usually gets a boot once a year, so I've reached my quota..

Thomas