Comp freezes after a couple mins of gameplay. help?

[RSI]

I have a tbird 1.333 system w/256MB PC133, TNT2 video card. Please don't tell me to upgrade the video, as I would have so already if I had the money for that.

Anyway, it's a Diamond Viper 770D 32MB AGP card, supposedly a regular TNT2. I can OC further than TNT2-Ultra speeds without a problem, or at least I could. I played hours of online UT with my friend a few nights ago, at 160/190MHz (default for my card is 125/150MHz, TNT2-Ultra is 150/183 default, I think).. basically running 1024x768 with every setting possible maxed out, and still getting ~80fps. Perfectly happy with this.. only problem is, i've started to get freezes. OK - massive overclock, not surprising. so I lower it down a good bit. I play for a while, completely not expecting it to freeze again, but it does! So I lower to regular TNT2-Ultra speeds.. I play a bit and I still get the freeze.

When it freezes, the video just stops. keyboard isn't frozen, unless I try to escape it or something. If I'm playing an MP3, the MP3 continues to play, it does not stop.

I've been running at default (125/150) TNT2 speeds for the past day and a half - and that seemed ok, at least with UT for a while. I played RTCW, while playing an MP3, and after 1 minute it froze like all the other freezes. WTF? Default speeds, with a bigass fan on the card? Just to verify, I touched the card right after the freeze. It was ***cool***, as in not warm! It can't possibly be over-heating or anything related. What could it be? Possibly a driver issue? I don't get why it would suddenly start messing up? I am running Windows 2000 Professional. I would test it in XP, but I can't OC in XP for some reason, the option just isn't there.

Thanks in advance for any help.

-RSI

 

[Tung]

i used to have this problem and gave up on it.
it might have something to do with the IRQ assigned by your motherboard.
i don't really know what im talking bout.. but a clean install of windows will likely solve your problem.
that's what i did.

 

[RSI]

Worth a shot, I can't stand this.

BBL.

-RSI

 

[MustangSVT]

for me, i added a homemade heatsink & fan on the Radeon and when it started to have problems with lockups and such i checked the heatsink compound and it was all dried up... (i used some radio shack stuff back then).

after cleaning it up and reapplying everything, it worked like a charm so far, so go check it out

 

[RSI]

Ok, even when I'm very highly overclocked, I touch the videocard and it's cool, never exceeding "a tiny bit warm". The CPU is close by, with a bigass fan oni t.. air is blowing down onto the video card from that, and the video card has a heatstink and fan on top of that.

Argh.

-RSI

 

[RSI]

Ok If I use the default TNT2 driver nothing freezes. Except I can't play D3D full screen, it lags 2x as much in 640x480, and software 640x480 lagsli ke a bitch.. wtf?

-RSI

 

[RSI]

Alright, now I'm using the 21.83 drivers and 2X AGP in the BIOS as opposed to 4X, apparently the card is 2X, I guess. So far, it froze once, when I was at 166/199 playing UT. I set it to 150/183 (Default for Ultra), and set 3DMark 2000 to run all day. I came home and it was still running, hadn't frozen. Does that mean this is safe?

-RSI