Assassin's Creed/CoD WaW/Rome Total War

System (home built)
Windows xp service pack 3
Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3P (rev. 1.1)
Intel Core 2 duo 3.13mhz sock775
4gb Ram Corsair
1tb hard drive Western Dig
PNY 9600 GSO 768 mb video card
(also have a BFG GeForce GTS 250 1gb vid card) - I have tried both, not at the same time of course.

If I am going straight into any of those three games listed in the title, the game loads up fine and I can play anywhere from 5 minutes to well over 4 hours until I get a crash. Most of the time I get a crash straight to desktop with AC. The others will lock up and I have to do a comp reboot. If I try to ctrl/alt/del and shut down the game, the computer grinds to a crawl and takes about 3 minutes to finally respond to the action. Once I have clicked "end process" it takes about another minute to respond to that. The response is a blue screen to a reboot. Upon ALL reboots of those games, Windows asks me to report the error...I do...and every time it tells me to either reduce the hardware acceleration OR update the video card drivers. Neither works. I get the same results for both video cards, no matter which one I have in the computer. The drivers are all updated (mother board/video card/audio driver, etc.).

If I go online before I play any of the games, for more than 5 minutes, Rome total war gets to the game load and it locks up with really weird misplaced portions of the screen graphics and it becomes unplayable....yes, I have removed the game, done a defrag and reloaded.

I have done spyware/malware/virus checks up the ying-yang...I'm clean.

 

i suspect your video card is getting too hot (both of them, maybe). You might want to get hwmonitor (or something similar)to monitor your temps while you are playing.

you might also want to check your ram and see if it's functioning correctly.
http://majorgeeks.com/MemTest_d350.html

 

I would check temps as well. Ntune is nice http://majorgeeks.com/NVIDIA_nTune_d5328.html
Evga precision is what i use for video monitoring while playing.
http://www.evga.com/precision/
though i am not sure if you can use it with those cards or not. One other thing that might be a problem, since your system is home built... I am only assuming that it is OC'ed. If so the setting might be too high. If not I would guess temps, or drivers. good luck.

 

Thank you for the advice, all...

I seem to have about 1200 or so registry errors according to one program, and about 5 errors with the RAM. WTF! This blows.:banghead I hate to flush more money away to fix these problems only to have the original problem NOT fixed. That's the way my luck works out with these things.

 

Wouldn't hurt to make sure your motherboard is correctly identifying the speeds for the ram. check the timings in the bios to see that they match up with the manufacturers specs.

 

one more ?, you said you had xp SP3, with 4 gb ram. Is it a 64 bit OS, or 32. If it is only running 32 bit, then i would say the game is detecting 4gb, and the XP OS is only using 3gb. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

 

Yes, the OS is only detecting 3gb (3.2). If the games are detecting 4, is that a problem?

 

Would this be measured in Hz? What would this be labeled as in the BIOS?

 

No no that's not a problem , 32bit windows only recognizes and utilizes up to 3.5 GB, this is more than enough to run any of those games.

Have you downloaded HWmonitor yet and checked what temps your pc parts are?
Post what temps you get back here

Dacads

 

Ok:
voltages:
cpu vcore 1.06v - 1.20v
DDR 2.08v
+3.3v 3.3v - 3.4v
+5v 4.97v
+12v 4.8v - 12.42v
VBAT 3.20v

temps:
System 47C (constant) 46C - 66C (spikes at 66c for split second every so often, then instantaneously drops back to 46c)
CPU 41C (constant) 40c - 46c
Core2 duo
core 0 43c (42-55c)
core 1 43c (42-49c)

GeForce 9600 GSO 58c (58-60c)

I have had the computer on for about 5 to 6 hours at this point.