Random game freezing

[jphoto]

Ok, hardware first. Soltek K8TPro-939 (updated BIOS), Athlon 64 3000. No overclocking. 1 gig DDR-400, used both single and dual-channel mode. Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb, MSI brand. Maxtor 80gb SATA. SB Live! and onboard audio both used during troubleshooting. Retail heatsink and fan. Ultra 500w power supply, quite new. Windows XP, of course. Newest drivers all around.

Some games just...freeze. Sometimes after 2-3 minutes, sometimes after 30 minutes. Doom 3, Age of Mythology, Medal of Honor I can play all day and all night no problem. Far Cry (1.3 patched), LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth, and Warhammer 40k all experiance the freezing.

Heat? If I can play Doom 3 for hours, I figure it'll handle anything. Annoyed because this is so inconsistant.

So, things I've tried. Disabling AGP Fast Writes. Changing memory from dual to single channel. Changing from onboard audio to SB Live! Cursing. Updating motherboard BIOS. Running a CPU burn testing utility to watch my temps (55-65c) Aztec chanting. Disabling writes and reads in SMARTGART (wow, performance sucked). What have I missed?

 

[meltdown75]

Well, your specs look fine as far as compatibility. I will assume you have applied sp2 also and are not just running plain old XP. Fast writes should be enabled since your card supports them... i would run the ram in dual channel simply because you can... hmm

other than your cpu temps being high, i'd suggest making sure nothing is running in the background and also possibly running a memtest? do you have a temp shutdown override option enabled on your mobo? perhaps it is attempting to shut down when reaching a certain temp. 65C might trigger it, although you only experienced that when doing a burn-in.

lastly you have the video card to think about... if you try it in another rig and it does the same thing, then you have your culprit... good luck!

 

[jphoto]

I'm running SP1 and all updates except SP2 itself. I'm back on dual channel because it doesn't seem to be the issue. Fast writes, I'll re-enable that, same reason. I've tried running Windows really lean on the processes, not much help there either. The video card is from my previous motherboard and worked great. *slaps forehead* My previous board only supported 4x AGP and I have not tried that yet on this one....God that's so obvious. Er, excuse me. I'll be back.

 

[meltdown75]

I've done it before... same EXACT thing. I went out and picked up a Geforce 2 card way back when, and put it in my machine without changing to AGP 4X...

... think of how dumb I felt after b!tching at the clerk who worked at the store!! It happens... post back with how you made out.

 

[jphoto]

Well it SHOULD work. 8x card, 8x motherboard. However, now that I've forced it to 4x Far Cry has gone two hours and been running great. I knew I was missing something simple, thanks. That's why I come here, to bounce my troubleshooting off someone. For some reason when I start listing these things to my wife she runs away.

 

[meltdown75]

:laugh: lol, that's a good one... the wife helping with computer problems... ahahahah

one of the things i bought my wife for Xmas was a new USB key. She calls it "my gig". it's pretty cute.