Random Crashes

ExileBlue

Chieftain
Joined
Jan 8, 2006
Messages
10
Location
UK
I'm fortunate in having 3 PC's - 2 for gaming and one for D'Ling, Office an' stuff like that. My 2 gaming rigs are virtually identical.

1) AMD 3200+, Radeon 9800 Pro - ATIdrivers, 1 Gig Ram - Crucial, Soundblaster Live, Soltek mobo
2) AMD 3000+, Radeon 9800 Pro - microsoft drivers, 2 Gig Ram - Ballistix, Audigy 2, Soltek mobo

I copied one of my save games from 1 onto 2 and played it move for move identically (cleaned out the cache in both PC's). Video setting were default for both.
The game locks up in both rigs however 1) runs for longer - sometimes 3-4 hours before resolving the freeze by applying the three fingered salute. 2) can run for maybe an hour or sometimes less. The fault I'm suffering from is identical in both rigs and is repeatable exactly on 2 but not on 1.
I then swapped out the 9800 and replaced it with a GeForce 4800 Ti and used microsoft drivers. The same game froze again, however the game event of the crash was intermittent and unlike with the 9800 Pro was not repeatable. Changed to Nvidia drivers but no improvement.
I have also had lock-ups with another game X3-The Return, again on both machines, however many other games run fine, Rome-BI, Dawn of War-WA.
I've more or less convinced my self that the problems are not wholly hardware dependant so where do I go from here?
 
Stay with the 9800 Pro - its a high end card blows the 4800 away

Have you loaded V1.52? If not do so its a must have patch.

If yes, please post your Dxdiags for each machine via the 'go advanced ' button below

Regards
Zy
 
Thanks Zydor - and yey, I know the 9800 "blows" away a 4800 Ti but I wanted to determine if it was an ATI driver problem or not.
Interestingly, has any one tried to re-start a game after Alt+Ctrl+Del. This kills the game, but if I don't reboot the PC and try to load CivIV straight away the game start-up screen freezes and it's like a mirror image of each half - very similar to those abstract ink images you get when you fold a piece of paper - almost af it's been "de-interlaced" and your looking at a split image - weird! Does this indicate that their are images stuck in video memory/cache ? The game is fully patched to 1.52. Latest Direct X have also been installed. These are games machines - no AV,anti-Trojan, spyware, firewall and on different IP address from my internet PC. I'm pretty paranoid (not necessarily knowledgeable ;) ) about security so these PC's don't connect to the net. BTW, I also uninstalled the 5.1 and reverted back to 4.12. In this rig it was a step backwards in more ways than one. When the game froze Alt+Ctrl+del no longer worked and the PC had to be cold booted - something I hate doing.
 
slow down the changes lol :)

Need to stabalize what you have then pick it off step by step

Need the Dxdiags to understand your systems properly to progress

Regards
Zy
 
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