Nice computer but still crashes

[Dark_Elf]

This is driving me crazy because I love Civ4!!

Alright, my computer is solid but it still keeps crashing. And it only crashes with Civ4. I built this computer a little over a year ago and it runs all high performance games great. From reading some of the posts here, I'm gonna assume it is graphics card related, which is what I've suspected on my own. It only crashes later in the game when more stuff is shown on the map. It will randomly crash later, and I mean bad crashes that I have to hard reset from sometimes. But most times it will just say Civ4 had an error and closes it. Here is my system's original config:

AMD 64 FX-55
4GB RAM (all 1GB cards, all Patriot)
ASUS 8N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
2 GeForce 7800 GT (256Mb) ran in SLI-Mode (PCI-Express)
2 WD 200GB SATA drives
Windows XP

Now, I've got Civ4 with Warlords so I've all the recent patches. Windows and my graphics card all have the most recent drivers as well. So, my first thought was even though SLI-Mode works well in other high-performance grahics games, that might be my problem. So I removed one of my graphics cards and just ran it with one GeForce 7800 GT. That didn't change the performance one bit. (yes, my graphics cards all have the proper power connected to them and my computer is not over-heating)

The strange thing is I used to get this damn game to work all the time on my old laptop. The only thing was the laptop CPU wasn't as powerful so later in the game on big maps it would slow down between turns. This computer breezes through the turns, it just randomly crashes when the map is moved later on.

Suggestions?

Here is my DXDIAG.txt

 

[Raider62]

I dont think the crashes in this game for the most part are computer related. I just built one about a month ago. AMD 5000+. 3 gig ram, 7900 nvidia, and still get all kinds of damn problems. AFter tens of manhours of troubleshooting on 4 different setups i have to draw the conclusion that its just crappy programming of the game itself. but thats just my opinion people with more expertise may be more helpful...

 

[Dark_Elf]

I dont think the crashes in this game for the most part are computer related. I just built one about a month ago. AMD 5000+. 3 gig ram, 7900 nvidia, and still get all kinds of damn problems. AFter tens of manhours of troubleshooting on 4 different setups i have to draw the conclusion that its just crappy programming of the game itself. but thats just my opinion people with more expertise may be more helpful...

I agree that is certainly part of the problem considering I can play higher-end games. However, it seems to me many of the problems seem to have a common theme of using nVidia video cards. Not to say the video cards are not good, but that Civ4's problems are bigger with those cards. So I'm hoping someone knows something? Some kind of tweak?

 

[Dark_Elf]

As I said in other post, don't make the same mistake as me. My computer kept randomly reseting/crashing while playing Civ4 late in the game on a huge map. Then, the big-one came. My computer did not come back up after it crashed it. Now, I have a hardware failure somewhere. Not sure if it is motherboard, RAM, or hard disk. If you get those random Civ4 crashes like I did, don't be a fool and continue to play. It is not worth buying new computer parts for it, especially when newer hardware isn't the issue in getting Civ4 to work properly.

 

[hotstuffjsn]

I would advise you to test your video card's direct3d and directdraw capabilities on the Direct X Diagnostic. It appears your latest driver has not been test by windows, so this may be why it crashes the game to the desktop. As to why it doesn't in other games, I don't know but this was the only thing I could think of.