Civ IV fried my video card!!!

[spyder77777]

I like the heat argument, it makes tons of sense. Here's one more strange thing to throw out there though. In about 5 out of the 7 sessions I started in the game, the first crash would come 30 minutes into the game. Then the crashes would begin ocurring about 3 hrs apart thereafter. The crashes wouldn't happen more often as I kept playing. Once again though, these were crashes that required a "hard reboot" 95% of the time. Video was lost and no key combination did anything. Strangely, I probably would have kept playing the game forever like this had my video card not experienced the collapse that it did.

Thanks again for the responses everyone.

 

[Circastes]

PC cooling affects performance as much as the parts do (when pushing the hardware), they both need to be taken on simultaneously.

Do you mean cooling affects stability as much as the parts do? Because a graphics chip doing, say, 380MHz is always going to complete 380,000,000 cycles a second regardless of whether it's 20 degrees C or 70 degrees C. Stability is affected instead because as you heat up various components on the graphics card, you get voltages changing in certain places, and voltages are what determine whether a certain condition is "0" or "1". If conditions that are supposed to be true are false, or vice-versa, you get rendering errors and eventually crashes because the whole logic system no longer adds up.
Heat will never slow a chip down unless you've enabled something like thermal throttling on a CPU where the system bus or CPU multiplier is automatically reduced to keep the CPU below a certain temperature. I think a similiar system is present on Radeon cards with the "Overdrive" feature, but both of these features be disabled.

 

[1989]

what does rma'ing a card mean and do??

 

[Atol]

I see two major factors here.

1 People are not keeping the inside of the computer clean. Dust will slow down the fans of CPU and GPU which can lead to burnout.
2 ventilation Where my system Has 3 intake fans and 3 out. So Hot air drawn out fast.

I know this for I have a Laptop and a desktop. My laptop 3.4ee L3 2mb cache 1gb ram. radeon 9700 256 megs. Has to be clean out. Or even taken apart to keep it cool.

My desktop Amd 64 with windows 64 xp/windows xp. 2gb of ram radeon 9600 256 with 6 fans in it. It will get alot of dust in it.

So please keep your system clean. Even smoking will lead to fan burn out.

 

[Esjay]

I feel your pain Syder. Same thing happened to me. Civ ran fine for about a week then it started crashing and now I can't even finish booting up a game without it crashing. And now I can't run any of my games. The TW series, Call of Duty games. Nada. And that's one big coincidence considering all the problems people are posting in the forums.

 

[markh]

I see two major factors here.

1 People are not keeping the inside of the computer clean. Dust will slow down the fans of CPU and GPU which can lead to burnout.
2 ventilation Where my system Has 3 intake fans and 3 out. So Hot air drawn out fast.

I know this for I have a Laptop and a desktop. My laptop 3.4ee L3 2mb cache 1gb ram. radeon 9700 256 megs. Has to be clean out. Or even taken apart to keep it cool.

My desktop Amd 64 with windows 64 xp/windows xp. 2gb of ram radeon 9600 256 with 6 fans in it. It will get alot of dust in it.

So please keep your system clean. Even smoking will lead to fan burn out.

My sytem is clean and I have good ventilation. I do not smoke and I clean my case regularly. With no other game I have heat problems and other games are far more graphics-intensive than civ 4. It is badly written or better said : this product is not finished/optimized. Just my opinion.

 

[Atol]

Gunnergoz What is your temp Like my Amd 64 3000+ cpu runs at 33c 91f
Motherboard temp is 30c 86f. My setup is this way cool air blowing from the front and side 3 fans
and Hot air blowing from the rear and top plus the power supply. 3 fans plus 1 Power supply fan.
When the game runs It runs around 50c which adds up to 125f. Which is pritty cool for my system. I seen some Intel systems run 75 degree Celsius = 167 degree Fahrenheit. Presscott chips run Hot.

My suggestion is this. Buy a can of air and clean the fan from the heat sinks. And mybe buy a new case. That has 3 fans 1 blowing cool air in from the bottem keeping the grapics hard drive and such cool. One blowing from the side blowing onto the motherboard. And one from the top or rear to blow out the heat.

Yes my Amd 3000+ is overclocked at 2.2ghz

 

[Atol]

My sytem is clean and I have good ventilation. I do not smoke and I clean my case regularly. With no other game I have heat problems and other games are far more graphics-intensive than civ 4. It is badly written or better said : this product is not finished/optimized. Just my opinion.

I would love to hear How u keep your system cool. And please give me your temps while running civ 3 and not. For me Even Call of duty or Doom3 My system never get over 125f 50c

 

[markh]

I would love to hear How u keep your system cool. And please give me your temps while running civ 3 and not. For me Even Call of duty or Doom3 My system never get over 125f 50c

I have two additional fans installed in a big tower case. As I said I did not have any heat issues before and during the weekend my PC runs for about 8 - 10 hour sessions. No problem ever. When civ 4 crashes the CPU is at abt. 57°C and the mainboard at abt. 33°C which should be well within the limits. If I remember correctly the limits are set to 72°C from my software watching the temperature.
Nevertheless even the case gets quite warm now and one fan is blowing out really hot air when civ 4 crashes. I think that leaves the graphics card.

 

[zig20fan]

I have to agree with everyone on cooling. I have had hard drives drop out of a raid confiuration due to MINOR dust build up... and I have a fan dedicated to the hard drives! I have also had an old ATI card (Rage Fury) die on me. It was a few years old when it died, but if I turned the graphic acceleration functions off, I was able to use it as a basic VGA card. May come in useful if you need to get stuff off before sending it back. ATI fixed it and returned it and it is still kicking in an old P 150 (I just can't get rid of old computers!).

I was finally able to run CIV4 on my P4 3.0, 1GB RAM, ATI AIW 9800 Pro last night AFTER I reverted back to drivers from Dec 2003 (v 4.12). Having read this thread, I will play again tonight and run a log of my temps and voltages. CPU Cool is a pretty useful tool for situations like this.

Having said that, I was also able to run it on my laptop with the 1.09 patch. The laptop does not meet min specs but does run the game. After about 45 mintes, I picked it up and put it on my lap to lean back in my chair and about burned my legs! I don't have any temp monitoring programs loaded on it, but it was HOT. Didn't BSOD or die, but I immediately quit playing and it cooled down.

Mike

 

[Circastes]

what does rma'ing a card mean and do??

Return Materials Authorization. It's the repair or replacement of a product by the company producing that product.

 

[spyder77777]

I feel your pain Syder. Same thing happened to me. Civ ran fine for about a week then it started crashing and now I can't even finish booting up a game without it crashing. And now I can't run any of my games. The TW series, Call of Duty games. Nada. And that's one big coincidence considering all the problems people are posting in the forums.

Esjay, you don't know what the problem is? Ouch, that must be horrible... "Lucky" for me the video card was obviously the problem and at least I can get it replaced.

As everyone has pointed out, I'm going to be extremely cautious from here on out IF I decide to load up Civ 4 again and continue trying to play. Even though my case is well cooled and clean, I'll likely clean it all out again and run monitors and alarms on voltages and temperatures.

Other than the wonder animations and crashes, the game actually ran fine for me before. I played through about three big crashes to complete a 7.5 hour game on a large map with minimal slow down, for example.

I like the comment that the game is beta and we're still waiting for the release, that's exactly what this reminds me of. Typically, I'm the one reading the forums on any given game and saying, "man, I'm glad I don't have any issues with this game." Like I said, this is really the first game ever where I'm the poor sap struggling with major issues.

 

[phalzyr]

any game that constantly gives you CTD's or worse you should never play again until those issues are fixed. Luckily Civ 4 works great for me, but if you read the memory leak thread you'll find out there are some memory management issues with Civ 4 on certain system configurations, which can casue CTDs or worse... 1.09 didn't seem to help it any for those experiencing problems in that area. hopefully 1.10 will or if harkonnen releases his hack that it helps most people with issues.

Overheating destroying parts is one of the issues that self building machines has. maybe you just needed more cooling for the card itself. The fact that doom 3 or whatnot special super duper FPS game didn't cause it to overheat means nothing. Newer games can stress video cards in all new ways, and FPS games don't stress a card as much as other genre of games when put into 3D graphics.

 

[zig20fan]

Ran the game tonight for about five hours. CPU Temps went from 36C (no load) to 56C within a few minutes. The processor load fluctuated between 85 and 95% the entire game. This game is not that graphic intensive. As soon as I shut down the game, the CPU temp went back to 36C in about five minutes. Agree with most everyone else that if you run Civ4, monitor your temps and voltages.

 

[phalzyr]

Ran the game tonight for about five hours. CPU Temps went from 36C (no load) to 56C within a few minutes. The processor load fluctuated between 85 and 95% the entire game. This game is not that graphic intensive. As soon as I shut down the game, the CPU temp went back to 36C in about five minutes. Agree with most everyone else that if you run Civ4, monitor your temps and voltages.

Are we talking main board CPU temp or graphic card CPU temp? 56C ===== darn where is my themometer

Graphic intensity is relative to the video card capabilities. I'm not saying CIV 4 is more graphic intensive than thae latest FPS, I haven't done any tests. Just saying FPS aren't the end all/ "My computer can handle anything since it can whomp an FPS."

 

[Fiontar]

Well, I haven't been monitoring my temps, but I did roll back my ATI driver to the Omega version of the old 4.12 drivers (I think these are about a year old). Since then, no problems playing on small and standard maps to the finish. (The only reboot error I had was loading a late stage save file, 1987 ish. The wierd thing is that it wasn't accompanied by the extremely high fan revving the old crashes were causing. Clearing the games cache allowed the game to load properly on the next try). I need to try a larger map next.

Whether the game is improperly interacting with more recent graphics API features in a way that causes overheating (some of my serious error recovery messages in WinXP referenced failure due to an infinite loop being created, leading to the crash), or is just causing crashes for non heat related issues seems a minor point to me. It seems that the coding of the game itself, in interaction with more current drivers, is causing crashes and added stress on some people's systems.

Some people have had success in stopping the crashes by using tweak utilities to force PixelShading to the 1.1 standard, vs. the 2.0 API standard implemented in current drivers and hardware. I'm guessing that the driver I am using with success now probably is coded to the 1.1 standard, or at least a version earlier than the one causing the problems here.

Blaming people for not using the latest drivers seems to be a common excuse for game companies when people experience problems like this and in many cases using the latest drivers is the proper advice. Ironically, in this case, for many the serious problems can only be fixed by rolling back their drivers to a much earlier time frame. When Firaxis updates their own drivers to the most current ones, maybe they will then be able to get somewhere in fixing this problem.

 

[Amiee]

I think what this, and other threads is proving, is that CIV IV is a hunk of junk and while, yes, maybe they aren't frying your hardware....warm booting every 5 mins (happened to me until I stopped playing...) doesn't help the hardware at all and THAT is their fault!

I'm sick of trying to get help, answers, and a fix and we get nothing.

I think they should refund our $ if we send the game back to them.

I feel ripped off...

 

[Lahdoz]

@ Circastes - stability would definitely be a better term, but a super cooled system can handle over clocking and thus be faster, I should have explained better.

Air flow will make a big difference with air cooled systems. I have a fan on the lower front of my gaming rig that blows in toward the PCI and AGP slots. I have the 2 PCI slots right next to the AGP slot open so the GPU fan has more air to pull from. I also leave the the PCI block off plate that is just below the AGP slot open. Removing one of the CD bay block offs so that air can vent out the top of the case made a huge difference. Also try not so stack your hard drives. The top of the HD releases a lot of heat, so if you have a floppy or another HD right on top of it, the life span of that drive will be shortened. RAM electronics on-line sells a good selection of air cooling and other goodies.

 

[Renata]

I got the video card on my last computer fried just playing Conquests. But the fan was on its last legs anyway, so it was only a matter of time.

 

[gunnergoz]

Yes, I forgot to add that one reason I am a cooling fanatic now is that my last video card before the Geforce 5700 melted in action during the summer...what a stink! I was lucky the card didn't flame up before the short circuits were cut off from power. So now I run more fans than a burlesque stripper.