PCTech Forums

Ive had this on going problem for about 2 years now and Im baffled. Ive posted on sites,tried all the advice,updated drivers,but Im thinking is this what it could be...
The thing is my pc will occasionly freeze up when playing 3D intensive game ie Vice City,Ut2004 etc. Ive done all the usual stuff,Ive even upgraded my graphics card 3 times and still the problem persists. Im thinking now,could there be a problem with my CPU in some way that is causing this?

Erm,cooling? No,only kidding,just. I have a fan and heatsink on the CPU,nothing special,plus I usually keep one of the sides of my pc just slightly open.

You should invest in a few case fans, depending on what your case can hold, of course. My opinion is that you can never have enough cooling. Exaust is really important, you have to get the hot air out or your going to get the exact problem your getting. Most cases hold at least 1 80mm rear exaust and front intake fan, some hold more. I would recommend installing as many as it can hold and you should see a difference in performance.

Doesn't your graphics card have a built in fan? If it doesn't then I wouldn't think it would be good enough to play games like the ones you listed... maybe I'm wrong??

Try going into the bios and look at the memory settings---your looking for something like "slow, normal or fast" or "70, 60, auto." What you want to do, is set your memory to a slower refresh rate.

This freezing can be caused by a memory mix --two different vendors memory installed, overclocking, or just memory forced to run too fast.

If you go to the games web site, there are usually patches for all sorts of problems. Games push the envelope. Thats what your computer is telling you when it freezes.

Hope this helps

Thanks again IC,I'll check my BIOS and see what I can do.

Well I checked my BIOS. Could'nt see things exactly how you described them so I just reduced a few things here and there like AGP aperture size and 'maximum setting' value. Loaded a game that I know also freezes up and it,well, froze up again. Think I'll have to wait till I get a new CPU.

I should have asked this earlier but what are the system specs for this machine?

XP Home edition
512 Mb RAM
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP8X
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
SoundBlaster 128

I doubt very seriously its your cpu, im running almost the same setup, just a different vid card. I really think its a cooling issue, my XP2000 use to give me the same problems. I added 2 intake, 2 exaust plus a pci exaust fan and now i run everything smooth as silk.

mmmm,ok. I'll have to check to see how many fan mounts my case has. Its a bit of a cheap old case this so I doubt it has too many. Thanks for the help.

I can only see 2 fan mount type things inside,ones got this black plastic cage thing over it. The problem is though I don't think there's any power connection left to support them.

You would need an adapter to add more power connections such as this one

http://www.ultraproducts.com/product_in ... cts_id=187