For the love of God... help

Dear Gamer's Hell,
For a long time I've read the forums but never thought of a reason to post, untill now. I just bought Doom 3 and I can't play it because after I've been playing it for ... oh about 5 minutes the whole computer goes and crashes and restarts. It did the same thing on: The Farcry demo (both of them), The Painkiller demo, and the UT2k4 demo. All are pretty high end i suppose. I've been told that updating my graphics card drivers/getting directX9.0c should fix it (i've tried both 9.0b and c), but they don't. My specs are

AMD Athalon 2.0ghz
Geforce 4 Ti4200
512 mgs ddr ram

Even with the settings on like... low and lowest possible resolution it still crashes. But it's like 5 min into the game every time. I don't think its the graphics card because I see people running D3 just fine on lesser ones. Hmm I dunno help if you can. I don't wanna waste the 55 bucks I spent on Doom...


sorry this probably should've been in the Hellp forum.

whats your OS?(be sure to get new drivers too)

Mine kept freezing like a minute into the game, several times. I had to open up the case and put a desk fan pointed at my video card. I have the same Ti4200 as you, so maybe it's something with the fan for it, and how much Doom 3 pushes it. I haven't had any trouble since, except when i got swarmed by 5 or 6 of the 2 headed things it frozed up again, but that's very minor.

Check your process list in task manager and kill any process that looks suspicious... but don't kill any ati drivers ;)

Man having such a great system and not being able to play doom 3 much suck bad

Anyway... did you overclock your cpu or graphics card that might make it crash ?

Check bios settings, check memory ;) lol

No seriously... what is your sound card ?

Try updating sound drivers...

Try disabling sound blaster to see if that's the problem.

have you oveclocked your cpu before? try reset the bios, it might help.

thanks guys ill try updating my XP, hmm the soundcard thing... I dunno how that would be effecting much, no, I haven't overclocked it before, annnnd if everything else doesn't end up working, yes I might just open up the case and point a fan at it :P. Speaking of that, I notice the cpu is overheating a lot lately. When it does it brings up a warning and says if it doesnt go down within like a minute itll go into hibernate. It only really happens when I'm playing any games (even like... HL1.) Strange because the tower is really well ventilated. Thanks

I've had warnings and shut downs before because of heat, but it usually doesn't happen. My fans suck, so I just keep my desk fan handy. It works.

now, Slinky, just how big is this fan you're talking about. I have a floor fan thats like... 1 and a half feet by 1 and a half feet. I was actually thinking of mounting it on the side of the tower instead of having one side at one point :P. anyways ill just set that up next to the tower with the side off of it and see how that works. Only problem is its pretty loud so headphones will have to do for now

Yeah, that's what kinda fan I'm using. My PC fans are louder than the fan I put on there, so I just turn my volume up to compensate. It doesn't really drown it out, but I get used to it and don't notice it.

Edit:I also tried one that was more powerful first, and put it too close to the card, and it shook the card which made my screen shake. Don't use it if it's too powerful.

Mannnn Slinky that works great thanks a lot. I just got done playing for like 2 hours (I was amazed, I expected to only last 5 min.) But yeah taking off the side panel and putting a floor fan next to it worked great. Oh my god when I saw myself in the mirror I had an idea that something would happen but when it did i almost fell outta my chair. Mannn I dunno if i can play through this game :P

thanks you guys :thumbup: