very strange problem... chipset related maybe?

[lhgpoobaa]

BEWARE, LONG POST.
righto... summary of problem.
while playing unrealtournament (UT) it occasionally slows down to almost a complete stop. hard disk access is constant.
one time i managed to get back to the desktop and open task manager.
suprise! UT was using a whopping 780+ MB of ram... and it was increasing every second.
also... my need for speed 5 does this everytime i try to start it up. i never get by the startup screen. just constant swapfile use.
and no way am i out of ram. or even close.

P.S. my system is very stable. my best so far is 4 days straight of 100% processor usage with SETI@home.

system specs:
athlon 1200C
asus a7v133
512MB of PC150 Kingmax SDRAM
tnt2 pro graphics card
SB live player
52x CD
40gig ibm 60GXP as primary master (not on promise controller)
16.8gig ibm 16.8GP backup drive primary slave
12x ricoh burner
netcom 56k modem.

software:
latest bois (1005a)
win 2k pro
sp2
Via 4in1 4.32
detonator 12.40 drivers
latest sb drivers
system setup as APCI (ACPI?)
512MB system ram with 512-1024MB swap file allocated to primary 6gig partition (2.7 gig free)

i had been using RAMidle a week earlier, but that had given me grief so i had disabled it AND removed it from startup.

only other thing running was SETI@home in the background.
total ram usage (not including UT) about 100 meg.
UT ram usage after i closed UT down and restarted ~ 128mb.

WHAT THE HELL would cause UT to suddenly go nuts and use soooo much ram, physical and swap file???
it was running for about 10-15 minutes quite happily till it just went CHUG.
ive had this problem now 3 times with UT (the other two i had to reboot)
with need for speed 5 it happens every time. regardless of what else is running.

HEEELP!

AMD chips run hot. The world is getting hotter. Therefore, AMD is causing Global Warming!

 

[extremity]

O.K,
To give you a short answer is not possible, I can give you a subjective p.o.v.
I have a feeling that the RAM drain is being artificially produced by the DLL`s in all the graphic calls it makes to the files, I cannot express this in any technical way, because the actual procedures are not within my knowledge, I can say that this sort of behaviour is becoming more frequent because of the software's complexities.
In the cases I have encountered, I have Solved this crisis using hardware fixes.
Normally I get rid of the CDROM and replace it with a DVD-ROM which seems to help with the decoding of graphics, I then go through and install as many audio/graphic/video codecs as I can get my hands on, this also seems to help with the swap file clitch.
I do believe that this is software in origin and is pipeline/hardware in practice, the software crowds are always pushing the hardware envelopes and never come clean with the REAL basic requirements to run their games anyway.
If you can, try the above and post the results if any.

On the Edge of Extremity
Microsoft Registered OEM,DSP,MCP
Custom Building of PC`s.