Constant Game Crashes

[ThirdEye3]

Hi all,

I have a new PC and when I try to play Oblivion, FEAR or FEAR 2 on it I experience way too many crashes. Usually its an image freeze with the game (sound continuing behind it). Esc – then Ctrl/Alt/Del usually gets me to the Task Manager so I can get out of the game but usually if I try to restart the game the system will crash. Sometimes its just a straight system crash part way through the game with the PC rebooting by itself. This is happening way too often (like every 5 minutes usually). Then sometimes I'll get an hour's play before it crashes, but usually its very short.

My system is as follows:

Core i7 920
Asus P6T Mobo
OCZ 6G Triple channel PC1200 RAM
2 x Western Digital 500GB SATAII Green HDs
Asus 1Gb EAH4870DK video card
2x LG GH22NS30 SATA DVD drives
Thermaltake V9 case
Antec 650W PSU
Winfast DTV1800H tuner card
Samsung SyncMaster 2494HS monitor
Windows XP home with SP3

My first thought was video drivers and I've tried three different drivers including ATI 9.8 (v8.64). Still no change in performance.

Cooling seems fine, CPU temp 30C, Motherboard temp 33C, GPU temp 38C.

Any ideas on what's causing the crashes?

It only seems to be these three games (I don't play many). rFactor plays beautifully with full everything at 1920x1080 giving me around 240fps and I can get through a full hour and a half race. Its just FEAR and Oblivion crashing......and yes, I've applied the latest patch for all of them.

Any help appreciated,

Chris

 

[justinheir]

Try minimizing all the settings on your video preferences and see the differences. Maybe the default settings of your games are way too much to handle by your system.

 

[SpinachEater]

Your temps seem like the idle temps. There is no way your GPU is 38C under full load. I would do some stress tests and check your temps again because those are the important ones.

I had some issues with ATI's 9.8 drivers. I had to go back to 9.7. Have you had any luck with those? Are you just installing over top of the previous drivers or are you doing a proper uninstall first?

Do you have all of your correct MOBO divers installed seeing it is a new system?

I would start with stress testing various components and watching the temps. Sometimes you can just get a bad stick of RAM for example. Another culprit could be a faulty PSU. If you have a spare, I would swap it out and see if you continue with the crashing.

 

[ThirdEye3]

Thanks guys,

Still no joy.

I've tried a half dozen different video drivers and all give the same results so I don't think that's it. I haven't tried 9.7 but I don't know if that will be any different to all the others. Still, it won't hurt to give it a go.

I had already updated my MOBO drivers to the latest when I first got the PC built.

I'll have a look at the possiblity it could be bad RAM so I'll try doing some testing......maybe even take it back to the place I bought it from and ask them to have a look. I was trying to avoid that....its a pain lugging the thing across town.

Can you guys recommend a decent RAM test I can do? I just tried Mem Test but it didn't give any feedback and I'm uncertain that it tested all the available RAM.

Thanks for your help.

Chris

 

[ThirdEye3]

oh.....and I also tried running Oblivion on the lowest settings possible (ugly) but the damn thing still crashed after about 3 minutes. Not even enough time to get the temps up.

 

[cafuddled]

If I were to take a stab at this issue, I would say it’s a hardware fault. Most of the time you will get these types of symptoms from overclocking, but it can also be related to hardware just not doing what it says on the tin. Memory is famous for the latter issue, on every rig I have built I have had to underclock or slow down the memory in some way shape or form to get the system running stable, most of the time this is due to the motherboards memory controller not being up to the job some other times it’s because the memory is just not that good.

But anyway I digress, I would strongly recommend you taking this back in for testing in the shop you got it from and tell them it keeps crashing. But I would almost place money on the unit becoming stable if you under clocked RAM/CPU/GPU or increased the voltage slightly for the RAM/CPU/(NORTH/SOUTH BRIDGE) Motherboard settings.

Oh and a good utility for checking RAM (or overall system stability) is Prime95 in torture test mode, Google should point you in the right direction.

 

[ThirdEye3]

Thanks for that. Sounds interesting.

Very busy at work at the moment but when I get a chance I'll take it in for a look. In the meantime I'll have a look at this Prime95.

Chris

 

[SpinachEater]

Did the people at your shop build the rig then? Are there any overclocked components?

I think the most possible scenario is that one of your RAM modules is faulty. I think RAM is the most common component that comes flawed.

Read this first Newegg review...almost sounds like your problem
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227477

As an alternative to stress tests, you can pull out all but one module and test each one individually. Put one in and play a game that crashes all of the time and see what happens. If you can target one stick then you know what is going on.

The only problem with this method is that you may not find a faulty stick and perhaps the problem is with insufficient voltage for all 3 in together. You then can do what cafuddled is saying but that probably is up to your builders since should have some sort of warranty with them.

 

[justinheir]

Yes, it could be a hardware issue. Any progress with your problem so far?