Constant crashes with GT 530

[Tiedote]

I'm having pretty serious crash issues with Civ:BE. Basicaly my screen announces that it has lost the connection to the computer and goes black. I have to do a manual reboot every time. This happens really frequently, like I can maybe play the game for 20ish turns before it crashes.

What's really irritating is that I actually updated the drivers because the game recommended me to do it. Before the update I got into 120ish turns. So the update only made matters worse.

I know that it's not a very good gpu but I managed to playe Civ V with it just fine. Never had any crashes from what I remember and I played huge maps with lots of civs.

I tinkered around with the graphics settings, tried windowed mode, validated the cache and nothing so far has helped.

I suspect it's my gpu because it's the weakest link in my system and the driver update made things worse. I had similar issues with the Firaxis X-Com game on higher difficulties with lots of enemies.

I've attached my DxDiag in case it may help.

 

[Tiedote]

I tried rolling back my gpu drivers but there was an update yesterday so it just rolled back to the previous, non-working driver. I don't know if you can roll back further or not?

Reupdating the driver and then reinstalling the game did not help either.

I don't think that there is much else to be done? Or is there?

 

[darkskies]

You can get older drivers from Nvidia web site and try them, if you remember the driver number that worked try reinstalling that. The graphics have been updated quite a bit over Civ5 so that's not really an indicator of how well BE will work.

 

[Tiedote]

It seems this a gpu heat issue. I don't know if my computer is just dusty or if my gpu is failing but it seems it overheats whilst I play. I downloaded msi Afterburner and underclocked the gpu. I can now play the game, I just have to play it in windowed mode and keep and eye on the heat. I'm just waiting for a can of compute duster I mailordered to arrive. Then I'll clean my computer throughoutly and see if this passes.

It's a bit too much a coincidence that this started after the driver update though. I think this might be an issue at nvidia's end, not Firaxis'.

 

[darkskies]

If it is heat (and with the updated graphics it may indeed be too much for OC) you might think about replacing your fans, they may not be putting out as much CFM as they were when new. I vacuum the dust out since it pulls the dust out and doesn't force it into small places like canned air can do...just be careful not to pull any wires if you don't know where they belong (or use a small vacuum designed to pull dust out of computers, I use a shop vac, but then I built this system and used to build systems for sale so I know where everything belongs ).