Game locks up computer

[Sunshine]

After playing RO for a certain amount of time (varies between ~20 minutes and several hourts), RO will lock up the computer. Symptoms are that sound stops playing, graphics freeze and the computer completely stops responding; a reboot is required. Interestingly enough, this problem has never occured when in practice mode, only when playing multiplayer.

My system: AMD Athlon64 3000+, nForce3 mainboard, 1GB ram, XFX 7600GT, WinXP SP2, with the very latest nVidia drivers (163.71) installed. I initially suspected the video card, since RCTW:Enemy territory would also randomly lock up my machine (though it continued looping audio), but underclocking the videocard fixed that problem (it seems XFX made a bunch of cards that are overclocked with overly aggressive timings by default), and I'm not experiencing this issue with any other game.

 

[Zetsumei]

ro is more sensitive than most other games you could try downclocking.

But try the following first, go to start search and search for redorchestra.ini

inside there look for something named like cachesizemegs and set that to 1/4th your total system memory.

 

[Sunshine]

Zetsumei,

thanks for the tip. Between setting the CacheSize to 256 and installing the Quake War:Enemy Territory Demo (which updated some DirectX files), I could actually play a couple of games yesterday and today without any problems. Hopefully that fixed it ...

 

[Murphy]

I think there is a new driver out, but I could be wrong. One of the 163s was quite crappy though and caused some trouble with a bunch of games. So it could be related to the driver as well.

You could also try to reduce the hardware acceleration for sound in the dxdiag (start -> run -> dsdiag -> ok -> Sound (or something)) if you suspect your soundcard of being crappy and/or onboard.
It solved frequent crashes in WarCraft 3, Baldur's Gate, Ghost Recon and Flashpoint for me back in the days on my old system.

You could also try to reduce the aperture size for your graphics card in your bios as setting it too high causes system instability. Some games suffer from this more than others!
The Performance you might lose or gain by doing this isn't anywhere near as high as it might seem from reading a description of what this setting does!
Read up on that before you do it. I'm not much of a computer guy myself and I don't want to be responsible for anything if something goes horribly wrong. Normally you can just change it back if it doesn't work like you want it to but you never know, right?
I can't tell you a good value because I don't know what would be good for your graphics card.

 

[Boogerhead]

It wouldn't hurt to grab a can of air and clean all the dust off your fan, heat sink and video card. That may not be the problem, but ... it wouldn't hurt.

 

[fiftyone]

At a guess I would say the the Video card is asking for more power than can be supplied.

If I remember correctly the 7600gt does not use a separate power source.

When you under clock the card you are demanding less voltage.

Maybe !

 

[Sunshine]

Unfortunately, the problem reappeared on Saturday after ~15 minutes of playing


Now to address all the comments in order:

1. I currently have the 163.71 WHQL driver, released on 28. September, installed. According to NVidia, this is the latest & greatest. Prior to that, I had a 94.something installed - with the same issues (actually, my problems with RO where what prompted me to upgrade the driver in the first place).

2. For RO, I use a Plantronics USB headset, which seems to work well in RO and all other games.

3. I'll have to try out fiddleing with the AGP aperture size. I think I set it to 512, which seems to be too high (a quick googleing suggested this shouldn't be more than 1/4 of main memory, and some people suggest setting it to the smallest size possible).

4. Removing dust from the PC certainly wouldn't hurt, but I don't think heat is the problem - the NVidia temperature monitor goes to about 90 degrees Celsius maximum during heavy 3D use (it went higher before I started underclocking the card).

5. Since I suspected the 7600 was putting my power supply under undue strain, I measured power draw while playing RO - it peaked at around 120W, while my power supply is rated for 200W (or was is 250W ?), so I should have a comfortable margin.

What is most vexing about the whole thing is that I'm only having problems in multi-player RO, all other games and RO in offline practice mode seem to run just fine.

 

[Zetsumei]

remember whatever things might draw you got different rails on your computer.

3.3 volt 5 volt 12 volt rails etc. You might be using all of one rail while the others are nearly untouched.

12 volt rail is the most important one as thats the one your vidcard uses.