FordAnglia58

Greetings fellow gamers I have a persistent problem that is driving me mad. Every time I run a DirectX game, it will crash to desktop anywhere from a few seconds to 20 minutes into the game. This happens on EVERY single DirectX game. Operation Flashpoint crashes typically after 5 minutes. I have tried versions 1.1, 1.3, 1.46, 1.75, 1.85, 1.91, 1.92 beta and 1.94 beta (with the nomap extension) without luck. I have tried having no add-ons, and up to 1GB of add-ons - it makes no difference. I have read a large number of forums (Flashpoint and other) and the Avon Lady’s site for hints and tips. As you can probably appreciate, this is beginning to bug the hell out of me since I can’t play one of my favourite games. My system is: AMD 2700XP with standard fan (the internal CPU temperature is around 55-60 deg C) Gigabyte GA7-N400 Pro2 Motherboard (flashed to latest version F5) Enabled: on-board Firewire, USB and 10/100 LAN Disabled: on-board AC97 sound/midi and RAID 2 x 512MB Hyundai DDR400 RAM (with Dual Channel DDR400 enabled) Seagate 120GB Serial ATA HDD Leadtek 128MB FX5600 Video Card Samsung 52x CD-R/RW (Primary IDE Master device) Toshiba 8x DVD ROM (Primary IDE Slave device) Creative Audiology Soundcard Windows 2000 Pro (SP4) with DirectX 9.0b All of the hardware is about 4 months old. The system has not been over clocked. I have taken older components and replaced the new. I replaced the FX with a GeForce 3 AGP Card; replaced Audiology with a SoundBlaster Live!; replaced the on-board LAN with a 3Com Etherlink 10/100 with no difference. I have also tried Windows XP Pro and Windows 98 - still it happens. I have reinstalled and reformatted different operating systems countless times. There are no obvious hardware conflicts, nor are there any obvious driver problems. Standard software (internet browsers, office software, java etc) have no appreciable problems, they run fine. I can run them for hours or days without trouble. The system does not blue screen with the exception of the very occasional DirectX game when CTD. DirectX diagnostic shows no incompatibilities or driver issues. I have tried DirectX 8.0, 8.1 and 9.0 and the problem remains the same. The only constants throughout have been the Serial hard drive and the RAM (which operate fine). I have not used an IDE drive to boot from (and I don’t think it will make a difference). I have tried all available & compatible Gigabyte & nVidia Motherboard drivers; and every other driver I can get my hands on to the point where I am going mad. Does anyone have ANY suggestions as to how I might find out how to fix this PITA problem? Thanks for your time! Cheers all Ford

My apologies for my late reply as I had to travel out of town unexpectedly. Thank you Killswitch & Speeeedy for replying to my post. To answer your questions: Speeeedy - CPU idle temperature is at 55 deg. When OpF is running the CPU climbs up to 60-65 deg (I have seen it as high as 70 on a couple of occasions). I have been advised that 80 degrees is when I should worry and the BIOS alarm is set at 79 degrees. There is a thermal probe on the bottom of the CPU so the readings should be close to reality. Killswitch - thank you for your wealth of suggestions. The forum links are very valuable. Kudos to you my friend. The chassis is an ATX Full Tower (4 x 5.25" bays, 2 x 3.5" bays) generic jobbies made in China. The power supply is 350w x 230v made by E-Tek in Taiwan. We have ~240v mains where I live and I have been told this should not be a problem by an electrician. The CPU has a Thermaltake “Volcano 9†fan/heatsink (part A1365 - Thermaltake) with thermal probe attached to the bottom of the CPU. The case has 2 x Thermaltake "Smart Case 2" (part A1357) fans mounted at the rear of the chassis (they are noisy sumbitches). I do not have a fan at the front sucking in air; the air intake is at the front of the chassis towards the bottom underneath the drive bays (hopefully allowing air to be dragged from the bottom to the top of the chassis.) I have added-up the voltage of the components and it comes to 302v if everything was running at once (excluding USB which I use rarely). The Gigabyte monitoring software does not show a huge spike or drop in power when I switch different things on or off. I think the best method of explaining how I installed WinXP can be found here: Optimise XP Checklist I follow this method as it has worked well for me on other WinXP rigs I have set up. For Win2000 and Win98, I use something closer to steps 1, 2, 3, skip 4 and then perform step 5. At the moment I don't have Cacheman installed (and haven't in the last two installs). Interested in your thoughts on this install set-up process. Could this be leading to some of my troubles? I have played around with the different settings you suggested, no luck so far but still early days. Lucky I somewhat enjoy the challenge of this nonsense, otherwise I would have drop kicked it out the window months ago. Thank you for your invaluable assistance. Cheers Ford