PC freezes while playing most games - HELP

milltown

I have:

Athlon XP2400 Tbred
512mb Crucial DDR 2700 RAM
Creative GF3 Ti500 64mb
IBM 20gig
WD Caviar se 80gig
MSI mobo
Sound Blaster Live value
Windows XP + SP1
Direct X 9

This problem pre-dates everything bar the IBM hdd and the Sound blaster. From time to time while playing a game the screen will go black and it sounds as if the audio is stuck in a loop, the same split second of sound just repeating over and over. Have tried using the latest SB all in one driver pack but it doesn't seem to work properly, won't let me set digital audio.

Games affected include (pretty much everything I've played):
Half Life
MOHAA
GTA3
Vice city
Max Payne
Unreal 2
UT 2003

Any suggestions welcome, thx.

Dcully

Could be the drivers your using for your vid card.
What drivers r u using?

milltown

4345 sound right? I tried 44xx but they actually slowed the PC down, according to 3dmark 2001 at least!

Care to recommend the most robust, up to date detonators anyone?

amp

I got around 600 extra points in 3d mark 2002 when I did the same detonator upgrade. Although I seemed to lose it when I went from Directx 9.0a to 9.0b (but then I haven't rebooted yet).

dragon_ninja82

Is your ram made out of 2 ddr dimms or 1? I had the same prob and it turned out one of my ram sticks was faulty and that was causing the freezes.

milltown

Ram is 2*256 sticks. Hmmm...
I suppose the best way to find out is take one stick at a time out and run some sort of memory soak testing program, yes?
Can anybody recommend one?

I hadn't thunk of the RAM tbh, I always viewed buying Crucial RAM as a sort of insurance policy. Thx.

BKtje

or you could just take out one of the sticks of ram at a time and play games..if it freezes you know that its eirther faulty/not at fault. If after both it still freezes then its unlikely that either is faulty and could be something else.

Another thing you could try is install an OS on your other hd (and remove main) to see wether its the hd causing it.
Reason i say this is because i have a similar probem in CnC Generals (but only CnC) where the screen just stops and sound loops. Usually lasts 5 seconds and then continues. I know this is caused by my old hd that i stuck it to replace another hd as it was fine before.

Might be an idea to move/repost this in the technology forum.

milltown

I was going to post it in tech. but it seemed to be more of gaming problem. i.e. it doesn't happen while burning cds or encoding/playing divxs etc.

swiss

I was having a problem very similar to this with my old rig. Details of the problem are to be found here. Eventually I figured that my graphics card was overheating and ended up underclocking it (whilst crying profusely). That seemed to help a little, but did not cure the problem completely. Check your case to see if you have any PCI devices near your graphics card, (I had a sound card occupying a PCI slot next to my AGP slot) as this will severely limit airflow and hence cooling throught the card. Also consider putting some heatsinks on the ram of the gfx, it's cheap and allows more overclocking options should you want to go down that road.

Hope that helps. You could also run dxdiag to see if there are any directx hiccups.

Ryo Hazuki

Have you overclocked your CPU or GFX card in ANY way?

If so, undo it and see does that cure the problem.

Wook

i have the same problem , but when i reboot my Pc during a crash everything seesm to be fine afterwards.

so it's always like this : boot-crash-reboot-play
pretty weird

milltown

Unfortunately mine will crash again after a reboot, just a question of when.
Ta for all the suggestions lads I'll try a few things out this weekend.