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?
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?
) 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.
