I'm having a strange issue with my system that I can't figure out, without throwing a whole bunch of money at it of course.
The system:
Athlon T-Bird 1.3 CPU
Iwill KK266 motherboard (VIA 133A chipset I think)
Leadtek Geforce 2 Pro 32megs vid card
256megs PC133 SDRAM
My 3d games are screwing up on me. I've had this system for over a year and a half, but over the past month I've been having strange graphics problems. What happens is that I'll start playing a game, and then at some point the monitor will blink off and then on (as if it was changing resolutions) and the game will come back frozen, with a few little strips of corrupted graphics running across the screen, like skinny, colorful barcodes. Sometimes if I let it sit there, the game will come back and run normally for a little while (until it does it again), sometimes it freezes up again immediately, sometimes it just stays frozen and doesn't come back.
My 2d functions and 2d games work fine, it's done it once on the desktop, but that's the only time it's done it in a non-3d situation. Different games lock up with different frequencies, NOLF2 messes up pretty quick, GTA3 takes a minute or two as does warcraft 3, and Tony Hawk 3 locks up once in a while but not very often...though all these are just trends, it doesn't screw up in any specific situation in a way that would suggest some software mishap.
I think it points pretty heavily towards a heat or memory problem, though there's still questions with both. If it was heat, why is it happening now, and not before? I've had this same config for a long time (everything's been the exact same for 6 months, I've had the CPU/mobo/vid card for >18)without this happening before, and nothing is overclocked. In fact I downloaded rivatuner and underclocked it, which seemed to help delay the crash (NOLF2 crashes in <5 minutes, vs. <30 seconds), as well as turning off fast writes and side banding, but it's strange that this would be necessary all of a sudden. It sounds like my memory could be corrupted, but like I said, I can play 2d games like civ3 for hours with nothing happening, use the internet etc. If it was memory I would think it would affect more then just 3d games.
Anyway, anything you all could suggest? What the heck went wrong with my card? I don't know anyone with a geforce card that I could swap with easily, best I could do is a voodoo3 and I'm scared of the problems that could potentially introduce with driver conflicts and all that. I was hoping I wouldn't have to buy a new card soon, mostly because I wanted to wait for the geforceFX to drive prices down, but for the low $100's range you think a geforce 4 ti4200 is the way to go? I'm curious about ATI, but at that price range the geforces seem like a better deal...
The system:
Athlon T-Bird 1.3 CPU
Iwill KK266 motherboard (VIA 133A chipset I think)
Leadtek Geforce 2 Pro 32megs vid card
256megs PC133 SDRAM
My 3d games are screwing up on me. I've had this system for over a year and a half, but over the past month I've been having strange graphics problems. What happens is that I'll start playing a game, and then at some point the monitor will blink off and then on (as if it was changing resolutions) and the game will come back frozen, with a few little strips of corrupted graphics running across the screen, like skinny, colorful barcodes. Sometimes if I let it sit there, the game will come back and run normally for a little while (until it does it again), sometimes it freezes up again immediately, sometimes it just stays frozen and doesn't come back.
My 2d functions and 2d games work fine, it's done it once on the desktop, but that's the only time it's done it in a non-3d situation. Different games lock up with different frequencies, NOLF2 messes up pretty quick, GTA3 takes a minute or two as does warcraft 3, and Tony Hawk 3 locks up once in a while but not very often...though all these are just trends, it doesn't screw up in any specific situation in a way that would suggest some software mishap.
I think it points pretty heavily towards a heat or memory problem, though there's still questions with both. If it was heat, why is it happening now, and not before? I've had this same config for a long time (everything's been the exact same for 6 months, I've had the CPU/mobo/vid card for >18)without this happening before, and nothing is overclocked. In fact I downloaded rivatuner and underclocked it, which seemed to help delay the crash (NOLF2 crashes in <5 minutes, vs. <30 seconds), as well as turning off fast writes and side banding, but it's strange that this would be necessary all of a sudden. It sounds like my memory could be corrupted, but like I said, I can play 2d games like civ3 for hours with nothing happening, use the internet etc. If it was memory I would think it would affect more then just 3d games.
Anyway, anything you all could suggest? What the heck went wrong with my card? I don't know anyone with a geforce card that I could swap with easily, best I could do is a voodoo3 and I'm scared of the problems that could potentially introduce with driver conflicts and all that. I was hoping I wouldn't have to buy a new card soon, mostly because I wanted to wait for the geforceFX to drive prices down, but for the low $100's range you think a geforce 4 ti4200 is the way to go? I'm curious about ATI, but at that price range the geforces seem like a better deal...
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