game freeze

[brainchild]

I have just built a new system. works fine for everything except playing 3d games. About ten minutes or so into play it will freeze, and nothing but a hard boot will revive it. It's been running for a couple of months, and no other problems at all. Browsing,mailing,building webpages, running cakewalk programs, drum samplers, and the like no problem, only in 3d games. Any ideas?

750 mhz Thunderbird
FIC mobo
hercules 3d video card (apg 4 meg)
128 mb ram
AC 97 on board sound
soundblaster 128 pci sound card, both operational
wingman joystick
350 watt ps

Is this possibly a heating problem, I have no way to find out what temp the cpu is running. I have a spleege socket a cooler on it, and can't get much taller heatsink as it will touch the ps.

Thank for your help.

[Wizzard~Of~Ozz]

could be your vid cards inability to run the game properly, if you are running win2k, try running winamp and playing, when it locks listen to the music if it keeps playing then it's a vid card lock, if not then it's a system lock.

mine has similar prob with max payne on a V3, it locks up at 1024x768 but winamp will continue to run fine. gonna replace the card soon, possibly radeon 7500 if they can clean up the drivers. it's the same price as a Gforce 2 32MbDDR, 35$ cheaper then 64Mb DDR. and most benches sofar it beats the Gforce2 PRO.

[Toddly]

What kind of cooling fans do you have installed in the case. My system ran pretty hot with just one fan blowing out but when I added another in front to draw air in the temps went down 8-10C.

[awforrest]

I think I saw this right, you have both on-board and plug in sound cards active? If so disable the on-board sound.

Does your vid card only have 4 MEG RAM? If so you'll will mostv likely need to get one with at least 32 MEG to run any opengl or dirextx game.

As far as checking CPU temp try MBProbe. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but it does the job.

http://web.bham.ac.uk/jst829/mbprobe/

Hope that helps.

[MMock]

Sorry man but my guess is the video card. Depends on what game you want to play 4mb of video ram is not enough. For most win apps. you would only need a 4-8b card. but you wanna start playing games I would at least go out and get a voodoo3.

[SickPup404]

You know, I hate to say the same old thing.... BUT

Make sure you are using the latest video, sound, network, etc. drivers... I've fixed up a bunch of my problems by doing that and using DirextX 8.0a...