My First Gamer Computer

[South59]

I recently put myself a nice Logysis acyrlic case together.This was my first attempt at building my own gamer computer,It turned out marvelous!It has 4 cold cathode blue lights inside of it and i guess it has that fishbowl affect im told.Never the less it has a Mach Speed Technologies Viper 939A Motherboard(Socket 939)nice buss speed 2000 htt.Ive got 2 gigs of OCZ DDR2 memory installed,It has a AMD 4400+ Dual Core Processor,It has a 250 gig sata main drive and a 200 gig ide drive for storage.It also has a XFX 7300GS 512 pci express video card in it.After a better bios configured into this machine it ran just fantastic,always beware about the default bios thats shipped with motherboards as i have found out.....The problem lies with Games such as Splinter Cell Double Agent that even UBISOFT cannot figure out why this game crashes to windows multiple times during game play,any body out there having simular problems playing ubisofts newest endeavor?This is a nice computer yet it wont play the new rainbow vegas game,myself i think its all in the way there games are being put together what do you all think?

 

[Rob Williams]

That does look kind of like an aquarium, thanks to the shade of blue. Looks great regardless. To be honest though, I don't believe the motherboard to be the problem, but rather the video card. That's a low-end offering, so I wouldn't expect it to play a huge game like Vegas that reliably. It still shouldn't *crash* to the desktop though, regardless.

Did you happen to install the AMD Dual Core Optimizer to see if that aided in anything?

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html

Welcome to the forums

 

[South59]

Rob,by george i think youve got the problem figured out the video card is the culprit this time,yes of course ive got the AMD dual core optimizer from AMD and the latest AMD Processors drivers made available to the public up to date,Thank You for your suggestion im sure this is my problem,even a tech can learn,just started gaming about 2 yrs ago,I love it but have had some video card problems and games.Not all games.
Splinter Cell Double Agent is the game that crashes to your desktop,with vegas graphics just outright s__k.

 

[South59]

Rob,What Video Card would you suggest buying that will handle such games as the newer ones such as "Double Agent" and "Rainbow Vegas",would you say a Nvidia 7900-7950GT,8600GT?

 

[Greg King]

How important is DirectX 10 gaming to you right now? This is pretty much a non issue right now, and in the near future so it might not be something that you will want to concern yourself with.

For the card you mentioned, I am assuming you are shooting for the sub $200 range. In that price bracket, the best card you can get in my opinion is the ATi x1900 Pro. You can get then for under $200 and they will out perform the latest budget offering from nvidia, the 8600. If you absolutely have to go with nvidia, I would suggest the 8600.

 

[madmat]

The 7950GT spanks the 8600's butt in everything but benchmarks. That said if you're looking for low buck go with the 8600GT but if you're considering the GTS just remember that for about the same cash you can get a 7950GT that is faster but isn't DX10 ready.

Do you plan to run Vista? If not I wouldn't sweat DX10 support until you are ready to mess with it.

 

[South59]

Ok what im looking for in a video card is one that would have any problems running games such as splinter cell double agent and rainbow vegas both i have Vegas is almost unplayable and double agent has so many crashes and errors it almost as unplayable,i am running a XFX 7300GS 512 PCI Card and it does not handle it,do you think a nvidia 8500series -8600 series would accomplish this feat,Thank You for you help,Tim.

 

[South59]

no i do not plan to run vista at this time,like my xp pro,but would like to have a card that would play rainbow vegas and Double Agent without faults.

 

[Greg King]

Get the 7950GT. You wont be upset about the purchase.

 

[madmat]

Yep, the 7950GT will kick ass and take names in those games. It's essentially a downclocked 7900GTX, very powerful card.

 

[South59]

Man thanks alot,im looking to correspond with people who know how graphics affect these type of games im into advanced games such as these and plan on having a card that will satisfy my video demands on this computer,Thanks for everyones input,....so far it sounds like ide be looking into a 7950GT

 

[Greg King]

Your quite welcome. Good luck. If you want, keep us posted on how it goes. You will certainly see a vast improvement over the card you have now.

 

[Rory Buszka]

handlebars

"By George, I do believe he's got it!"

I hate to bust your bubble (and hardware upgrades are always nice), but I don't think his game-crashing to Windows is due to the video card. I think it may be a software issue, perhaps a driver conflict. If the problem were the video card itself, there would just be excruciatingly slow frame-by-frame issues. The 7300 should be able to play those games with all the settings turned all the way down, though they wouldn't be up to the visual standards of today's high-end gaming. So, turning down the graphics settings is the first thing to try. There's no need to go dropping $200 on a new hardware piece that may not fix the problem anyway.

If backing down the video settings gets you nowhere, try backing up your important data (documents, outlook folders, downloaded program installers) to an external hard drive, and blowing away everything on your hard drives, and starting from scratch. This time, install the video drivers first, before installing any other device drivers or putting any of your backed-up files back on the machine. Then, before installing any other software or drivers or game patches, install your game and see if it plays (with just Windows and the video drivers installed). If it won't play with a fresh Windows install and the latest NVidia drivers, then something hardware-related is probably hosed. But if not, then it's a software issue.

By the way, that's a nice-looking PC.

 

[South59]

Slow frame to Frame rate is what it actually does with Vegas,Splinter Cell Double Agent crashes to the desktop,occassionally.But when i play vegas,the control that you have over the main character(You)is dramatically slowed down to were you dont even want to play the game.It Terrible and i waited for it to come out and even upraded my computer to a AMD 4400+dual core perocessor and that would not even cure the problem,all that ubisoft ever says is its the video driver which i upraded and it wasnt the problem,then they said it was my pc cillin internet security,i took it off and even reinstalled the game with no better results,Thanks Man.

 

[madmat]

I've had games crash to the desktop from pushing my video card too hard overclocking it. It could be that the card is bad itself causing the failure but either way you'll get a lot more satisfaction from a faster/stronger vid card.

 

[Rory Buszka]

What I'm talking about is a complete re-formatting of your computer's hard drive, and a fresh install of Windows. That's why I mentioned that you'd need to back up your files. Depending on your usage patterns, it may not take very long at all for your current Windows installation to get 'crapped-up' with little background utilities and junk ("bloatware") that slow everything down. Then, without anything else installed, just the video drivers, see if that helps your game run at its maximum speed. You can back up your critical files to that second 200GB hard drive, and then just disconnect it from the machine while you're performing this test.

 

[South59]

Is there any kind of program i can run to check for video Card Failure?,Sorry to be a pain in the butt.South.

 

[madmat]

Yes but it runs a few hundred dollars and only checks the video memory. I had a TI4800 that started going all "Matrix" on me at bootup and I ran the program on it and found out that it had a bad ram chip.

 

[Rory Buszka]

I suppose you could see if it will complete a round of 3D Mark 2006.

 

[madmat]

That's the odd thing, my TI 4800 only screwed up at bootup. Gaming it was fine, 3DMark '03 it was fine but at POST it had random odd characters floating across the screen. Come to find out the memory chip that was affected wasn't being addressed under 3D load. Strange as hell.