games black out and lock up - HALP!

[Andy]

my new computer arrived today, it came with a 128mb card, which i replaced with my own 256MB Creative ATI Radeon 9600.

Its all been running fine, but when i installed some games (namely vice city and call of duty), im encountering problems. after a few minutes of play, the game locks up, the screen goes black, and in the case of call of duty, an error message was displayed - something about the card not responding. it is possible to return to windows, but the colour goes to 256.

i had encountered a problem like this with a card, and it was because the computer was heating up to really high tempertures. after opening the case up, ive found that the card is warm, but nothing id classify as being the problem. theres a pretty good cooling system in the computer, so i can pretty much say its nothing to do with the cooling.

any ideas?

 

[Sazar]

what card did you have before and what did you do to remove drivers for it and install new drivers for the current card?

 

[Andy]

the card that it came with was a 128MB DDR GeForce FX5200.

drivers werent installed for the previous card - i didnt install them.

 

[Sazar]

well... dbl check and see if there are any latent nvidia drivers sitting in your system that might have dl'ed themselves or been dl'ed by someone else...

once you have cleared them out go to www.ati.com and download the latest catalyst drivers for your card... reboot and all should be well...

 

[Andy]

i did all that but its still happening.

im going to try the other card - any other ideas are welcome - this is VERY annoying.

 

[Sazar]

it is quite possible you have a faulty card as well...

do you have problems playing other games or is the problem isolated to the 2 games you mentioned?

 

[Andy]

im putting it down to faulty card.

the card that the machine came with is now installed and the games are running fine. if they do start to mess up, i figure it might be a heating problem, and if so, ill get some extra fans in or something.

thanks sazar - rep points all round.

 

[Sazar]

thanks... and np...

its just unfortunate when something doesn't work the way you want it to off the bat

I had a dead mobo the first time round building the current system and took me a while to sort things out since the 3400+ had JUST come out...

 

[Andy]

ps. the link in your profile is for ntfs.