Half-Life/GoldSrc Causes Lockups

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18 Oct 2011
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133
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Kirkcaldy, Fife.
Hey guys,

I have a very strange problem, as stated above in the subject. I was wondering if anyone else has ran into this as well?

I can play Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, Fable III, CS:S, Deus Ex, literally any modern title, for hours on end with my OC'd rig and not incur any problems, what-so-ever. This is after days of thorough testing and gaming. It's totally stable.

Although, when I try and play some GoldSrc games and/or mods - The biggest culprit is my favourite Half-Life mod: Sven Coop! - My system falls to its knees..

I have this at the heart of my system:

Windows 7 x64 Ultimate

Intel Core i7 2600K: 4.8GHz - 60C under full load.

ASUS HD6950 DirectCU II: Flashed to HD6970 - Core: 910MHz and DDR5: 1380MHz+

I'm running the AMD 11.9 drivers. The 11.10-Preview 3 froze up fairly often.

I can push the core on the card to 950MHz, easily, and still have stable results. I'm thinking it could even achieve 1GHz. The RAM is another matter though, I can get it to around 1450MHz before it starts to become unstable; without the fan near 100%. Or it will show up artifacts and/or completely lock up my system within a matter of minutes. So I keep them around 910/1380 for a completely champagne (yet reasonably quiet experience).

The fan sits between 13% (idle) and 60% (load) on my custom TriXX settings. The maximum temp I've seen is 60C-62C, with the 910/1380 clock speeds.

Would you say it's just AMD/ATi driver problems, or poor W7 compatibility?

Is it actually possible that Half-Life has become so old that it can crash a modern rig? Or I'm just so old that I still play Half-Life like it's in its hay-day?!

I'm thinking that I might even run the game via the Intel HD3000 chip, to see if I can re-create the results. Then I'll know it's definitely W7 over the graphics card/drivers.

Has anyone encountered this problem before as well? (Not limited to AMD hardware).

Cheers,
Jamie.
 
Last edited:
Are you using OpenGL or Direct3d, I remember one of those causing issues on modern systems. Try running Steam/Half Life in compatibility mode as well.
 
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