Help with freezing in some games.

[Zaphrod]

Hi all,

I am having problems with my PC freezing in some games, specifically Call of Duty 4 and 5. It works fine in UT2004, UT3 and TF2 as well as LOTRO. It never crashes doing anything else.

When is freezes I can usually end task with task man but sometimes I have to power cycle it to get it back.

My system is:

Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
OCZ 4GB PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel Platinum Series
OEM nVidia 8800GTX
OCZ StealthXStream 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply
Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ 500GB SATAII Hard Drive
Windows XP 64 (Have also tried XP, Vista and Windows 7 beta)

I have the latest drivers and have tried various things including swapping the memory, using just one stick, setting BIOS to Fail Safe and Optimal Defaults, Installing different Operating Systems.

One thing that did seem to make a difference was swapping the graphics card to my old 7800GT. Though the games still freeze at times it frequently unfreezes on its own after a few seconds or if I press CTRL+ALT+DEL it unfreezes straight away once the windows security dialogue box comes up without having to go to task manager. This leads me to believe that it is a graphics card problem but I don't know how else to be sure without purchasing another graphics card.

I don't get any errors in event viewer in XP or XP64 but in Vista I get an error "The nv4_display driver has stopped working normally. Save your work and reboot the system to restore full display functionality" and in Windows 7 it seems the like the driver tries to reinitialise on its own but keeps crashing every couple seconds after that.

I have looked on the net and there appear to be quite a number of people having similar issues with COD4 and a few other games when running NVIDIA cards. I was thinking of under-clocking my graphics card to see if that had an effect

Any suggestions?

 

[Zaphrod]

I have them on auto. I don't understand what to change if I set them to manual so just figured the motherboard would get it right. Interestingly though, when I go into the nvidia settings and use the find optimal button for the clock speeds it actually reduces the Core and Shader clocks below the default but raises the memory clock.

 

[Zaphrod]

Ok I have set my memory to 5-5-5-18 2.2v as that's what OCZ says it is. I have used the Gigabyte DS3 guide to set up the BIOS but have not over-clocked anything. I will see how it goes later when I play. Thanks for the help guys.

 

[Zaphrod]

Reducing the GFX clocks seems to have helped the issue a lot, I did have 1 freeze last night but that is much less than the usual freeze ever other game. A mate has the same card as me but doesnt have the problem at all, he is going to let me borrow his card to see if I still get the problem on my machine. If not then I will be buying a new card. Which ATI card would give me similar performance to an 8800GTX as I am happy with the performance when it is working.

 

[Zaphrod]

Just thought I would update this in case anyone has similar issues,

I finally got the system to stop crashing by under-clocking my graphics card way down. I dropped the GPU to 450 from 575, the Memory to 800 from 900 and the shader from 1350 to 1200. I had tried higher numbers and the crashing reduced but didn't stop altogether. Just to be sure my mate brought over his card which is identical and ran COD4 for an hour with not even a hitch. So I need a new card.