Random lockups/reboots playing Warlords

[timbur]

I had very few (none I can remember) problems with Civ4. After installing and playing Warlords, I am getting random reboots of my system. Sometimes it will lockup instead. I have an ATI X1900XL running a little overclocked. I have the latest drivers (Catalyst 6.6). I have no problems running things like Titan Quest or other games for 12 hours a day (recent vacation). So I do not believe it is a problem with my system. At least not yet. Need to play more Titan Quest and find out.

I checked the Event Viewer and nothing shows in there from just before the reboot. (It shows tons of stuff after the reboot of course.)

Is anyone else experiencing this?

MB: Asus P5ADT2-Premium
CPU: Intel (cannot remember model number)
Graphics Card: ATI X1900XL
RAM: 2GB

 

[timbur]

Hmm, now that I think about it, I am not 100% sure I have played Civ4 since installing the new graphics card (ATI X1900XL, upgrade from ATI X800). Oh well, I'm not going back to the X800, since I put that in a different computer.

 

[Watiggi]

Hmm. Interesting. I am getting random freezes and resets. Mine also resetted several times DURING the installation - which made that a headache. I have an X800 PRO. There is some possibility that my computer is unstable outside of the game, but the game definitely sets it off.

P4 2.8G
512mb RAM
X800 PRO

 

[crunch]

Try a game without Mehmet II / Ottomans. My games crash as soon as I meet him.

 

[Watiggi]

For me, it allways seems to crash at the same moment in time (about 1 minute or so into the game - incl. opening movie and selection screen). If I skip the opening movie quickly enough, I can play 4 turns

 

[Jaca]

I'm experiencing the same problem and am quite sure it's my graphics card that cannot get sufficient cooling -- T-readings were indeed high. Some months ago, after bying CIV IV, I installed an extra cooling fan in my PC and the problem dissappeared. Now the weather is quite hot, and I don't have airconditioning in my room. The problem is here again. The funny thing is that the graphics cardis built so that the processor is facing downwards in my PC, with its own cooling fan blowing air against the bottom of the PC case. There's no room for an extra fan to efficiently get the hot air out of the case -- I think I need more flow. The bigger fan did its job in the winter and spring time, but cannot make it now.

I would suggest you take a look at your heat flow. You may want to consider installing an extra fan in your PC case.

Jaca

 

[timbur]

Jaca nailed it, although I didn't read his post until just now.

I had been noticing lately that the top of my comp was hot, before I got Warlords. After one of the restarts, I noticed my CPU was much hotter than normal. Sure enough, my case fan on the back had died, and instead of encouraging airflow was blocking it. A trip to Fry's and 30 minutes later and my temps were back to normal. I played Warlords for 3 hours last night without a single problem. It was also nice to hear the cool music. I had turned that off at one point since I thought I noticed a correlation with new tunes being played.

Cheers,
Tim

 

[Shablul]

Try a game without Mehmet II / Ottomans. My games crash as soon as I meet him.

I was crashing within the forst 50 or so rounds until I took this advice and played without Mehmed. No problems since, although I hope their patch comes out quick enough.

 

[Watiggi]

Okay, I got it going. Unfortunately I don't think it will help anyone else (including the OP).

First, it was crashing outside of Warlords - and while the Graphics processor wasn't kicking in, so it wasn't an overheating problem. Second, I have never had a problem with Mehmed (now that I have gotten the game going).

I really don't know what I did that got it to work, but I believe that it was just me not putting everything back in properly when I went to put in the new memory. I put the block of memory into a different slot and and now it works... so I don't know. I had to take the graphics card out in order to put the memory in or to move it, so I guess I just didn't put it in properly. Sorry that it probably wont help anyone, but now the game works properly.

Watiggi

 

[Avahz Darkwood]

I am haveing a crash problem when I meet the polish in the Mongol scen.

 

[Atwork]

My computer has been locking up at random times but only since I arrived in the early gunpowder age... My computer has locked twice now while I was in the tech tree attempting to change my research from Nationalism to Machinery. Even worse is that the computer is not booting up easily afterwards; the integrity of my system seems compromised. I hope there will be a patch released soon that addresses these issues because I'm afraid to play the game now.

PS my friend is having the audio problem and the locking problem.

 

[Watiggi]

Make sure it isn't the game, because it might be the computer. Civ IV is resource intensive and pushes the computer. I have found Civ IV to be better at testing the integrity of RAM, graphics card and overheating problems than most of the RAM testers and what not out there!

 

[Atwork]

The problem is not with the capabilities of my computer; the game in no way pushes my computer. However, I may now have a clue about what is happening. Yesterday, I went against my better judgement and loaded up the game. My computer took an even worse dive than the previous day. Now, my computer will not boot up at all. My RAIDed-Striping-Hardrives are not communicating with eachother anymore. I do not know what besides Warlords could have caused my hardrives to stop communicating with eachother. I'm now staring at the blue screen of death. Not mellow.

 

[Watiggi]

Well, I upgraded my graphics card about a week before buying Civ IV. I upgraded from a GeForce 4 MX 440 to an Raedon X800 PRO. After a little while I started getting problems with the power supply and it got to the point where it (only recently) started to destroy the integrity of the computer (general computer instability). I had a 350 Watt power supply and I have now upgraded it and it all works ok. Maybe there is something subtle happening with your computer that Warlords just pushes over the edge or something. I will also say that while I had these power problems, I got RAM stop errors (blue screen), graphics card stop errors, harddrive stop errors - it even went to a blue screen (stop error) because McAfee was causing problems. Now, I have put it all down to the power supply loosing stability. Time will tell. Maybe you might want to look 'outside the box' with your problem. Maybe the error is a symptom of something else happening?

 

[Jaca]

As far as my and seemingly timber's problem goes. I bought Warlords one and a half week ago. I experienced again those sudden and frequent shutdowns. All is working well now again, but I had to do the following: open my PC case and take a room ventillator very close to the graphics card to blow air right on top of that card. I can play without any problems now -- though I must fix this in a more estheatic way, that ventillator is not really a sight and it makes noise...

Jaca

 

[Atwork]

After having enough people check out my computer, the general assumtion is that Warlords overwrote a driver or drivers (which one(s) who knows) and the result is that my OS is unstable. The most likely problematic driver is DirectX. Warlords automatically writes over old drivers without warning or an opportunity to remove the old drivers -- something you should always do. Anyways, my OS is unstable to the point that, if Windows is able to load, it almost immediately hangs. My biggest concern now is recovering the data from my hard drives, but even still, I will definitely have to wipe the slate clean and start over. Lame.

 

[Watiggi]

Can't you just rollback the drivers? Or when you said that it overwrote the old driver, you were being literal! I thought something like that couldn't happen.

If you reinstall Win (I assume it's XP), get it all updated, then install the game and give it ago (before installing your other software) and see if the same problem happens again so you wont have to go through that again. If it does happen, reinstall Win again, install the game before the updates, don't play the game but instead let the updates update the system. I don't know if that would work, but it might :/