Stump the experts? Need help plz

Hi. I need some guru thoughts please. I recently did some major upgrades. My problem is when I try to play my Battlefield 2 game and the new BF2142 demo on this new computer, it crashes after about 45 seconds of gameplay under low and medium settings and various resolutions. BF2 did run fine with my older guts. Now the crash I'm getting is mostly a VPU recovery or the machine just reboots totally or just a black screen. Sometimes I can
still play under the black screen (gameplay continues) and sometimes the game is really froze. Its the only taxing game I have running right now.

Machine #1
new Athlon 64 3500+
new asus A8V-MX mobo
new 1 stick kingston ram KVR400X64C3A/512 double side (512mb) *not used right now*
new 1 stick kingston ram KVR400X64C3A/1G double side (1gig)
ATI 9800pro
new 600w PSU
new maxtor diamond IDE

Machine #2
sempron 3000+
asus a7v8x-x mobo
2 sticks of pc2700 ram at 256 each
maxtor IDE drive
FX5200 video card (although not used for this issue)
300W PSU

Now I did install my 9800pro card into my other machine and the game still plays fine. That system has the latest catalyst drivers but its running the 4.49 via pack.

General things I have done....
-flashed BIOS to current non-beta version (both machines)
-tried running default BIOS and tweaked BIOS (the usual 64 to 128 AGP stuff)
-currently running via drivers 5.10a on the new machine
-did initially install whatever version VIA the came with the mobo but 5.10 came after
-the new pc3200 ram bought same day, different stores
-tried switching out the pc3200, still crashes when used separately
-latest catalyst drivers
-using latest AMD drivers stuff from website
-turned on/off VPU recovery with no difference
-tweaked catalyst with ATI tools as per various forums
-performed artifact scan with ATI tools, no issues
-performed mem86 and got no errors with a few passes on the pc3200 sticks
-tried older catalyst drivers
-tried latest Omega drivers
-all XP updates complete
-fresh reformat
-game is patched and updated

Swapped older ram to new computer and the new machine wouldn't boot with 2 slots used with pc2700 ram, but it did boot only using one stick...and BF2 played fine on the NEW computer using the single stick pc2700 ram 256mb (hell ya it ran super choppy but RAN!). This is the only time when it has ran on the new system.

What have I missed? I'd like to try my pc3200 ram in the older computer but the older mobo is limited I think when using new ram. I'd like to think its the ram but they came from difference stores same day. According to CPU-Z, they were made different weeks in 2006 (so not a bad batch). They are both listed in my mobos qualified vendor list in the manual.

This is driving me nutz! I even had the RMA for the 9800pro until I saw it worked on the old machine, I thought I had a fried VC.

Your thoughts are appreciated and thanks for reading all this.

 

Battlefield 2 is very buggy,ones of the most buggy games I have ever experienced,EA are up to patch 1.4 and one full year of fixes but the game still doesnt run right "for me" and many other people from what I can see,the chances of the demo being bug free are slim to none

you havnt mentioned any other games,have you tried other games,do they crash in the same way

Try running this program if you can run it without crashing its the game,I know there is a memory leak in the early versions of the demo and game which could be the problem dependin on the ersion your using,I wouldnt hold your breath for a fix any time soon either

http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1712

 

Thanks for the reply.

I am running BF2 v1.4 yes and the only other game we run is sim2 but I dont think it crashes. It's hardly played though.

A little update....

I put my 9800pro card into the old computer yet again. In addition to the 2x pc2700 ram it has, I decided to toss in my pc3200 512 ram, and also my 1gig ram into the 3rd slot just for kicks to test out each for stability.

Both BF2 and the bf2142 demo now play fine on the old computer (as they did before). SO for me this rules out the card is not shot or the ram is bad.

Something on my new rig is just not allowing the graphics to do their thing. Its gotta be the VIA drivers (because they differ between the machines) or something in the BIOS. Maybe there's something about Athlon 64 CPUs that I don't know yet??

I'm completely stumped why it runs on the old one but not the new machine while both machines can use the same video card and same ram.

The other difference is the old computer is using either all pc2700 ram or mixed pc3200/pc2700 ram. SO maybe I need to slow down the ram in teh new computer? I dunno.

 

Just curious but, what brand makes that PSU and was it over 40$? usualy when you buy a cheap PSU, you get what you pay for and they do nothing but cause problems. Another thing I would be watching is temperatures, make sure they are all in pretty stable conditions while under stress.

 

Its a okia-600 PSU and its probably a cheapy (60$ canadian). After reading many posts around the web, I have concluded its a VIA vs. ATI compatability thing. Many people have the same issues with similar VIA chipsets and the answer seems to be increasing the volts to the AGP slot from 1.5 to 1.6 among a few other BIOS tweaks.

Now my problem is, I'm not sure how to do that because this mobo BIOS doesn't look like it supports an AGP volt tweak unless I'm missing it. There's only freq. options and stuff.

How can I boost it without a physical mod?

 

If there no bios option then you cant,but I think you should run 3dmark or similar graphically intensive game first to see if you can run them,sims wont push the card at all

Its best to completely rule out the game,one other major problem that BF2 has are incompatible sound cards which can also crash the game after a few seonds use try selecting software audio renderer in BF2 options

Is thee a reason you dont want to run 3damark?

 

Problem solved!!

In BIOS I put the AGP down to 4x instead of 8x and I enabled the DBI AGP trans. I didn't touch the volts at all.

I will check out later whether both of those above features needed to be changed (because I did them at the same time).