major prob!

Ok, heres the stats:
P4 titan series mobo, 875P chipset, dual bios, FSB 800/Dual channel DDR400/AGP8x support.
3GHz P4 800MHzsystem bus, 1MB L2 advanced transfer cache, hyper threading active.
1GB DDR dual channel RAM
Radeon 9700 series, 128MBram video card
MAD DOG predator blastwave 5.1/prowler soundwave 4.1 sound card
directX 9.0b
1 200GB maxtor HD
1 40GB HD (came in my old compaq desktop and worked great so kept it for the OS to run on)
All drivers are up to date
All windows updates are installed

NOW....
I built this machine recently and ran into a problem. I cant seem to run any games on it. I can run UT 2004 but it has to be in safemode. UT2004, MechWarrior 4, and anyother games just dont run. They either lock up at start or shortly there after. I tried to set differant defaults and stuff. nogo. I tried to turn off diferant things but dont know what to turn off. I really would like to know if there is a fix. Is it the new MOBO and DDR and CPU?
Is it a combo of all or one or what? Is it a patch that needs to come from the manufacturers of the games to run on this stuff? anyhelp would be nice.
Anyone else have this prob? The old compaq ran most of the stuff except progs or games that needed more cpu or ram but I have this hot machine and it's nearly useless. HELP!

 

My best guess is that it's a video card or CPU overheating problem. However, it may still be a driver issue or a configuration problem. What does the machine do when it locks up? Does it blue screen? Completely lock up? Reboot?

Open up the case while the machine is on and be sure that all the fans are spinning, including the one on the Radeon.

Check your motherboard sensors to see if your CPU is running hot.

Try a different video card and see if that solves the problem.

 

Hm. You could also check your CMOS settings and set them to "Default" or "Safe". If you're overclocking anything, set it back to normal.

 

Thanks for the help.
I tried everything but a new vid card. All the fans are happily blowing air, the chips are all chillin right, the card works fine when it is installed in the old computer. I will look into a new card. Maybe a cheap one and if that works I can just use it in my old computer to sell it for a few bucks. maybe even get enough to cover the cost of a newer, better, faster card but I dont know.
Thanks again. I will update everyone if I get the fix in. makes me angery since I can use this system to run my office work. LOTSO CAD stuff

 

remember, those games require direct x 9 (ut4 does at least). so you wont be spending less than 50 bucks for a new vid card to run them

 

Do you have a firewall ? Is it set up to allow these games . The reason i ask this is because i had similar problems. i would go to play the game and as soon as it went to load it would lock up my pc. all i had was a black screen nothing would respond . after rebooting with the reset button i viewed my event viewer and noticed TrueVector service, i knew that had something to do with my firewall. After allowing these games access in my program contol every thing worked fine.

just a thought

 

I wouldn't necessarily buy a new video card. First I'd try to find one that I could borrow just to use in testing. I mean, it might be a problem on the motherboard, or it might be something I didn't think of.