Is my video card done for...........

[mjdart]

I have the 4x Nvidia Ti4600 (2 yrs old in March). If I play DOOM 3 or Unreal 2 after 5 minutes or so the screen goes black and the pc locks up. Sometimes it will reboot itself and come up with Windows XP telling me the problem is traced to a Driver (nvidia). I recently put a new hard drive in installed XP fresh with the latest drivers 66.93. I loaded Medal of Honor set visuals to max on everything and everything ran great. I then installed MOH Spearhead - same thing no problems. I then installed Unreal 2 and it locked up after ten minutes of play. I'm running Direct X version 9(c) with SP2 on XP. Does Unreal 2 stress my Ti that much more than MOH? I thought with a fresh install on software I could eliminate driver conflicts.

I also pulled the card - reseated the cooler which is an add-on (seperate power connection). Checked all the connections pulled my P4 put fresh heat sink gunk on top and reated everything.

Any ideas on what might be happening???

 

[mjdart]

bump for help - ideas

 

[Okazaki Fragmenter]

Your unreal settings might have been too high for the card to handle. Can you change the settings down a bit before it crashes on you to test that?

 

[Visual]

Or... you might try underclocking your card a bit, if that makes it stable you probably got overheating problems.
Also try providing better airflow for a test - case open, maybe even a room fan blowing air into it.

It could eventually be a problem with other components, maybe RAM - run a test like memtest86 or something... also see if you got that problem with only 1 stick of ram, then the other 1... If you can be bothered with it at all...

I think your card is by far not "done for", its still going good... if you can't find what's the problem after you get bored with testing, you could try running "dxdiag" and disabling AGP acceleration from there(though that'll reduce performance), or you could try turning off AGP fastwrites or switching to a slower AGP speed from BIOS or from a tool like RivaTuner... I'm 100% sure you'll find a setting that stops the crashes and doesn't cripple the performance that much... And once you get sick from Unreal 2 you can turn everything bacck to full power

 

[mjdart]

Thanx, I'll do some more experimenting and yes Unreal 2 will give you motion sickness.