Ok, I've been dealing with this problem for some time now (more than 6 months). Basically, my computer loves to crash during games. It doesn't matter what game, it will always crash. Other programs don't seem affected. My first instinct was video card. However, I couldn't afford to buy a new vid card. Or rather, if I was going to buy a new one I wanted to get a good one, and that is what I couldn't afford. So I have basically tried everything else, rather piecemeal. Rather than get into a long detailed description of each step I will do the following.

I used to have an AMD 700Mgz chip on an Abit motherboard with 128MBs of Ram, 20GB HD, with Windows 98, a 300W power supply, Soundblaster Live!, Geforce 2 64MB Video Card, and an ethernet card.

I now have an AMD 2.0Ghz chip on a MSI KT3 Ultra 2 motherboard with 512MBs of Corsair 333 DDR Ram, with a 200GB HDD Western Digital, 500W power supply, and an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB video card, with Windows XP. I've even replaced the printer, cdrom, and speakers, although not due to this problem. The only things the same are the ethernet card, the monitor, keyboard and mouse...

I've reformatted several times, updated all drives to current, flashed bios to the current release for the board, and dicked around with all kinds of settings to no avail.

I don't understand how it's still doing it, it's almost entirely a brand new computer...

Anyone please please please have any ideas? I'm getting so frustrated with my computer these days, I've started playing Console games, not because I want to, but just because I want something stable! (not that I don't like consoles, I just want to play my computer games lately)

edit: when I send an error report to windows about half the time it says it's a video driver, but since I've replaced video cards and it still does it, I'm skeptical. A recent manifestation is I'll get a blue screen which goes by too fast for me to read just before it reboots itself. It seems to say something about the video card too, from the quick glimpses I've gotten.

edit2: the MSI motherboard has a built in Avance soundcard *blech*

Ragabash fucked around with this message on 06-21-2004 at 01:47 AM.

Make sure FastWrite is disabled in your BIOS, that causes crashes. Radeon cards hate FastWrite and it causes nothing but problems.

Also, I think it's generally very BIOS dependent, but I know some BIOS' (Like my old Asus A7A266) had a System Acceleration mode, when I had that enabled it caused nothing but headaches.

What games are you playing that makes it crash? Also do most of the games you play use Direct 3d or Open GL?

So far the only thing I can think of that could be causing your problem isn't the video card itself but the agp controller driver for your motherboard. I noticed your motherboard has a Via chipset. Go to via's site at http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=403 and download the latest set of hyperion drivers for your motherboard. I used to have the same problems you're describing on the same chipset and with an ati card (radeon 9000 pro). After updating the chipset drivers all of the issues I had were solved. Hope this helps.

-ant

Spiffy Puppet fucked around with this message on 06-21-2004 at 12:08 PM.

FastWrite is/was disabled so I guess that's not it. I didn't see an accelerated mode anywhere. I did however see that the primary graphics display was set to PCI instead of AGP, so I changed that. I'm crossing my fingers that that will be it. I'll update later on the success/failure.

As far as the AGP drivers, I did already update those and it's still crashing. The installation instructions for the ATI card was very adamant that those be up to date hehe.

As to which games, Majesty, Warcraft 3 + Frozen throne, Jagged Alliance 2 Wildfire, Star Trek Starfleet Command III, Europa 1400-The Guild, Star Wars Galaxies, Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries are all games that consistently crash.

Edit: haven't ever checked which they use, Open GL or Direct 3D

Ragabash fucked around with this message on 06-21-2004 at 07:46 PM.

*sigh* nope, still crashes.