mysterious PC problem

[Aod]

so my friends PC was a little underpowered to play BFME2 and i reccomended that he get a HIS 9550 (128MB) (he's a cheapskate).

anyway, after installing the card and the drivers, removing the Old Nvidia drivers and rebooting the PC, he wanted to test to see whether game performance had improved.

after between 30seconds to 20 minutes, the game will run fine (Artifact free) and then crash.

when it crashes, all movement will cease except for the mouse, then the mouse stops and then the screen goes blank and the monitor give the following error message:

"Attention, Out of Range!
H:138.8KHz V:173.3Hz"

or something to that effect (sometimes different numbers)
and sometimes the monitor just turns off.

the computer stays running throughout.

Anyway, thanks in advance for your help

His PC specs are:
Gigabyte (miniATX) motherboard (ZVM400M-RZ)
AMD Athlon XP 2500+
512MB of no-name ram

there was no cooling in his case (except the PSU fan and the CPU fan, terrible i know) but i've ruled out temperature because i shoved a massive room fan on top of the open case for makeshift cooling.

i suppose i should mention that these problems only started after the new Gfx card was installed.

 

[Neb]

could try different drivers, make sure you use DriverCleaner Pro aswell as just uninstalling the older ones.

 

[Lewcifer]

My first guess would be something to do with the monitor and the game's refresh rate..play around with them (lower them) and see what happens.

 

[Sir Random]

What psu has he got? maybe it's not powerful enough.

 

[2bullish]

Try getting the latest drivers for the monitor. Also, make sure V synch is turmed off.

 

[nO}{8]

turn the refresh rate down. also try the latest drivers.

 

[lucifersam]

I think a complete operating system rebuild could be in order here, it sounds like a driver confliction loop and thanks to the way windows driver database works it is very very difficult to completely remove all the drivers for your previous card. Good luck