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Nov 19th, 2006
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Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

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Hi, I was wondering if you could help me out with this issue. I have tried almost everything, even read similar posts but nothing did help at all.
Usually when I'm playing games like Battle For Middle Earth or Farcry, computer completely freezes up after some minutes of playing. And my computer should be able to handle these easily
I thought I was having temp issues, but borrowed a Heatsink for cpu and bought a new cooler, placed thermal compound on cpu, even replaced the case, and now temp has considerably slowed down, but I still have this annoying freezing up on games.
Yesterday I downloaded latest n-Vidia drivers for the video card, which is an 6600GT, and also tried installing Rivatuner, disabled AGP Fast Write in bios and Write Combining, as I read somewhere. But that didn´t help as well.
So plz help!!! Any ideas??

Computer specs:
AMD Barton 2500
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
1 gb DDR 400 mhz
Western Digital SATA 80 gb
Maxtor SATA 160 gb
Chaintech GeForce 6600GT 128 mb
PSU: Antec 550
Windows XP SP2

Thanx in advance!!
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Fimbulvetr is offline Offline
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Nov 19th, 2006
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Re: Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

I dont know about "Battle For Middle Earth", but I know Farcry.
I have A8N Sli/Athlon64 3700+/Gainward GeForce 7800 GT 512 MB/ 1 G DDR400 and I have (sometimes) poor performance with Farcry. Wooded areas and max. details are too demanding.

If it is not overheating issue, then I think it is memory related. Either voltage is not high enough, or the speed/timings are wrong.
Also, OCing your CPU and/or VGA would result in such behaviour.
I suggest that you set your BIOS settings to defaults (regarding CPU/AGP/Memory speed/timings). If those settings do not solve your problems, try manual increase of memory voltage. Some memory modules (like Gail) demand more juice than defaults.

Also, there are lots of bugs and patches for Farcry. Keep that in mind.
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Posting Virtuoso
Chaky is offline Offline
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Nov 19th, 2006
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Re: Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

What Chaky said plus:

Check the GPU temperature. If you use the new nVidia Control Panel, you can leave the temp. monitoring page open to see the graph, then start gaming but try to Alt-Tab to the monitoring page before the computer freezes. Back story: These GPUs change their temperature pretty fast, when you switch back to the monitoring page it has already lost 2°C. If you end the game normally, it's almost back to idle temp. (Ok, that was slightly exaggerated)
The net is full of reports of freezing 6600GT AGP but the nForce2 chipset has much less problems, so I suspect the card itself and some users report overheating probs with that card type.

@Chaky:
your PC/GPU have much more power than mine... it really shouldn't suffer performance in FC at any place since I even tweaked the draw distance and didn't have any slowdowns.
Last edited by Xpenetrator; Nov 19th, 2006 at 7:33 pm. Reason: Getting old....ah yes and it's late :)
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Xpenetrator is offline Offline
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Nov 19th, 2006
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Re: Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

Failed to mention that my CPU is running at 2200 MHz. 3700+ is the name.
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Chaky is offline Offline
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Nov 20th, 2006
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Re: Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

One more thing. Farcry settings:
1600 x 1200
max detail except AA is turned off. Seems that my system doesn't handle AA too lightly.
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Chaky is offline Offline
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Re: Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

I don't believe in AA.
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BeastOverlordH6 is offline Offline
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Nov 20th, 2006
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Re: Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

Ok...I ran FC in 1024x768, 4xAA, 16xAF, TAA on, all optimizations off, on a Barton 2800+ (2083MHz) and a 7600GS (430/900). Framerate never dropped below 25, even not in the heavy load levels at the end of the game (i.e. "Vulcan").
I ran highest possible image quality/low res and your rig had to render much more pixels, and this will have some impact, especially when using AA+AF, even on a 7800GT. I guess this can eat up more than the advantage of the 7800GT over the 7600GS. Your +200Mhz won't help that much since FC is very GPU dependent, so I guess everything's fine with your rig's performance...:cheesy:
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Xpenetrator is offline Offline
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Nov 20th, 2006
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Re: Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

Quote ...
I don't believe in AA.
You don't believe in the Aluminium Association? :cheesy:
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Xpenetrator is offline Offline
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Re: Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

You say your GPU is 430/900. Mine is 400/1000. 400 being core frequency.

"Aluminium Association" drops fps drasticaly on my rig. And not just FC. Doom 3, Quake 4 (although, I lack the system memory to run Q4 without extensive paging, Activision said "You have only 1 gig of memory"). FSAA doesn't do much damage, but I tend to turn that off too. Makes screen blurry.
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Chaky is offline Offline
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Re: Computer freezes badly while gaming, help plz!

Hmm... drastically is true, FPS can drop by 50%, but as long I get 25+ frames it won't harm. I played FC to check stability + OC capabilities of my new card, hence the 430/900 (stock is 400/800 on that card). But AF shouldn't make the image blurry? Its purpose is to rather sharpen (the mipmapped stuff)... Maybe you have the "optimizations" still turned on? They deteriorate IQ pretty much to the benefit of minimal FPS improvements.
But maybe we differ in preferences, too - I know that from my fellow flight sim friends, some of them hate the FPS impact and like the (subjective) perception of sharpness without AA+AF and don't care much about the resulting anthill flimmer on the ground. (I get headache from that )
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