moonmonster
Chieftain
Just thought I'd share this with you, in case it's helpful.
I have a Sapphire X850 XT PE video card. I've had no end of problems with Civ4 since I got it for christmas. The game would play OK in the early game, but as I progressed through, it would crash more and more often. When crashing, the screen would go black for a few seconds, and then the machine would reboot.
Eventually, as a game got later and later in, it would get to the point where I could not play a single turn without it crashing. Not much fun. (Not much fun when I had to reboot every few turns before that either.)
I tried all the other fixes on here, including disabling screenshots, and enablying d3d9 queries etc.. And also underclocking the card. No dice.
I had no other problems with this card, playing graphically intensive games such as Quake4, Fear, X3, and so on. But seeing as most crashes of this nature seem graphics-hardware related, I googled this specific card to see if there were any known problems.
Turns out they don't put much heat-conductive goop (probably has a more technical name) on the chip before they put the heatsink/fan on, so there's a really poor connection and it simply does not cool effectively.
I bought some silver-based head-conductive goop, removed the heatsink from the card, removed the existing goop (which was sparse to say the least) and replaced it with a generous dollop of the new stuff. Then I replaced the heatsink and put it back in the computer.
I have had no trouble since. As a test, I loaded up a modern era savegame that was crashing the game very regularly, and left it running overnight. It was still there in the morning.
I have a Sapphire X850 XT PE video card. I've had no end of problems with Civ4 since I got it for christmas. The game would play OK in the early game, but as I progressed through, it would crash more and more often. When crashing, the screen would go black for a few seconds, and then the machine would reboot.
Eventually, as a game got later and later in, it would get to the point where I could not play a single turn without it crashing. Not much fun. (Not much fun when I had to reboot every few turns before that either.)
I tried all the other fixes on here, including disabling screenshots, and enablying d3d9 queries etc.. And also underclocking the card. No dice.
I had no other problems with this card, playing graphically intensive games such as Quake4, Fear, X3, and so on. But seeing as most crashes of this nature seem graphics-hardware related, I googled this specific card to see if there were any known problems.
Turns out they don't put much heat-conductive goop (probably has a more technical name) on the chip before they put the heatsink/fan on, so there's a really poor connection and it simply does not cool effectively.
I bought some silver-based head-conductive goop, removed the heatsink from the card, removed the existing goop (which was sparse to say the least) and replaced it with a generous dollop of the new stuff. Then I replaced the heatsink and put it back in the computer.
I have had no trouble since. As a test, I loaded up a modern era savegame that was crashing the game very regularly, and left it running overnight. It was still there in the morning.
