Ok here is the story.
Im a online gamer long time fan of any online rpg for the longest time i have been scraping by on the bare minimum of gaming hardware. I recently decided to play Everquest2 and its minimum reqs were a bit higher than what i had so i decided to upgrade, here is the problem. After swapping out my mmx 440 for a nvidia 5700 128 ddr card Apollo brand i was able to run everquest with no signifigant performance issues but one very annoying problem. Ranging from every 15 minutes all the way up to 2 hours i have random freezes. The comp freezes and nothing will end the freeze aside from a restart. After consulting a few forums i thought it might be a power supply problem. I upgraded to a 500w enermax noisetaker, no change game still freezes.

Next thing to check is cooling, despite running a temperature monitor and finding all temps in spec i added a 3rd cooling fan to my case on the side to push air directly onto motherboard and vcard, there are 2 other fans an intake and exhaust. with the added cooling no change still freezes.

A friend mentioned a possible memory leak so i purchased a new gig of kingston ram and although game runs smoother and load times are less the freezes still continue. All drivers and bios are updated with most current and for vcard drivers i tried the stock nvidia and the performance omega drivers with no change.

The motherboard is ecs k7vta3 with an athlon processor 1150mhz im not sure what other system specs i can give to help troubleshoot this problem, but id be glad to supply any info i can if someone would like to help me with this problem. At moment i have another vcard on order to test if somehow it is the problem since i needed another vcard for my other machine.

I am beyond desperate for a solution to this problem. this is my first post so if i missed any rules of posting all apologies.

you might have a driver problem or your system is not good enough to run the card check your system against the min requirements for the card and if you meet them then download the latest driver at nvidia.com

Disable Fastwrites in the Bios, there are other bios changes you can make, when I get home I'll check mine out and list a few options for you to try.

the system more than meets the reqs for the card and all updates possible have been done.

is there a chance suggested by symptoms that the video card is just bunk?

Ok check your BIOS and in an area likely to be called Advanced menu options or something like that you will have:
AGP Arpeture Size: 256
AGP Spread Spectrum: disabled
AGP Fast Write Capability: disabled
Enhance PCI Performance: disabled

Take note of the current settings before you make changes, then set them like I have here (also the names might not be exactly the same on your BIOS as mine) then save and exit the BIOS and try it- this may or may not work but some systems don't like having Fast Writes enabled or PCI peformance enhanced so it is worth a shot. Also you can probably get into the BIOS on that board by pressing Delete when you power it on, or maybe the F1 key- it should say when powered on something like "to make changes press DEL" on the POST screen when powered on. If that doesn't do anything then it may be a bad video card.

Stupidest Problem Ever

after all the tech help from a huge variety of people one suggestion was never made and i never would have thought of it. There is only one thing in my case that i can not monitor the temperature on. The god damn hard drive its brand new western digital but somehow was overheating. I mounted a case fan directly underneath it and comp runs perfect now. Thank you for your tips and suggestions. Lol this whole project only cost me about 300 dollars in parts to realize a 5 dollar fan would fix the problem

cancer

is the sound ALSO frezzing or is it looping or does it carry on?