Driven to the limit trying to figure out why games crash.

[LeonardLeroy]

I have an

XFX 7900 GT
DFI LANPARTY ULTRA-D NF4
Antec 450W PSU that came with the Sonata II
G Skill 2x 1024mb RAM
Western Digital 250 gig HD
Windows XP Professional with SP 2
The onboard sound is karajan.
Realtek 8185 Wireless PCI Card.
AMD 3200 Venice

Some games just crash on me at random intervals, and I'm unsure what causes it. When they do run, they do run amazing.

Various games run perfectly such Call of Duty 2 or Morrowind Oblivion. On Max or in Oblivion's case, about max settings.

The two games giving me the most hell are F.E.A.R. and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. They crash in the same way. Basically, the sound goes haywire, and the computer just full on freezes.

I'm confused because Oblivion is one of the most hardware intensive games. but it runs amazingly without issue. F.E.A.R. and Ghost Recon, when they do run, run amazingly.

I thought it was the sound driver at that point, but I've isolated the computer up until the video card drivers, and it still froze.

I've juggled the latest drivers from DFI and Nvidia, WHQL and beta... everything. For sound, I've juggled Realtek drivers and the Nforce drivers.

DirectX9c installation is fine.

Ghost Recon was crashing right after a fresh install... right after I built the system around 2 weeks ago. This was before I even had the computer running the internet.

I've wiped the hard drive once since then.

I've Memtest86 exhaustively, over, and over out of frustration. So I'm sure my RAM is fine. I don't think temperature is an issue either. The crashes have happened right after i start a game after just turning on the computer after a few hours of down time, to crashing maybe an hour or so of gameplay. But I've played for hours with Oblivion on max settings, so that kinda clinches it not being an issue. I checked virus, spyware, but predictably turned up nothing, as this is a new system. All the latest drivers are installed, all the obvious answers I've followed...

I think it has to be in the soft ware somewhere. Like a driver conflict. I have reinstalled the software. Someone please help me out. I get no error messages to allow be to pinpoint where its crashing. The computer just freezes.

All the hardware is read right in BIOS and whatnot... I don't think I've missed anything.

Please, help me out. This issue is really tearing at me.

I don't think its application specific. I have crashes in a few other games as well, but they aren't as prevalent, and aren't as reproducible as in these two games.

 

[Megatron]

Some games such as Battlefield 2 come with the basic Nvidia or what ever drivers to run the game. It could be a graphics driver problem. Also have you tried patching those games. I think that battlefield 2 has a InstallShield defect or I am doing something wrong.