Problems with new PC locking up!

[Frost, colonel]

My new PC is an AMD Opty@2.880 with an Artic Pro 64 cooler, on a DFI Ultra D MoBo, 2GB Corsair PC3500 TwinX pro@DDR510, X1900XT OC, XiFi Sound and a 600W Seasonic PSU.
Windows XP Home, service pack 1, ATI 6.8 Driver.

It locks up or crashes playing DirectX 9.0c games. Company of Heroes only plays the vids, it will not play the game, Call of Duty locked up after a few minutes, But seems fine playing DirectX 9.0b games, RTW, Dawn of War, Imperial Glory.

The old demo of MTW2 plays fine, but the new gold demo(the exact same download works on my mates PC) locks up playing the video intro's to the battles or at differing fairly early stages of the battles or even crashes. Is the old demo of MTW2 Direct X 9.0b?? and the gold demo DirectX 9.0c???

Could my problem be that XP Home, service pack 1 only has the windows .Net V1.2 as a base for the ATI 6.8 Driver, but actually needs the windows .Net V2.0 as a base for the ATI 6.8 Driver????

My gaming PC is not on the net, so I'll have to sort something out if I need Windows XP Home, service pack 2.0!

Thanks for any useful advice because at the moment, I am not sure what to do, and even worse(heaven forbid) it looks like MTW2 won't play unless I can sort this!

[Aristocrat]

Do you have the latest video drivers? (I'm not up to speed with ATI drivers so if you answered this via your catalyst remarks I'm sorry).
If so, well, I'd look at cooling and the temps your gpu is reaching (and possibly cpu...possibly...actually no, as RTW would cause a crash if cpu cooling was an issue), so maybe your graphics card temp is getting too high.

But to me, this whole thing just screams drivers. So if you have the newest drivers, and have installed them over old drivers, clean them all off using drivercleaner pro (free program...google it) and reinstall the newest ones.

Also, upgrading windows to service pack 2 can't hurt.
On .net, I don;t know of any games or gpu drivers requiring .net 2, I've heard of applications (which catalyst control panel is) requiring it, but not drivers or games.

[Frost, colonel]

OK service pack 2 is on, it's a clean(wiped drive) install and my PC dude has tried the latest ATi 6.9 driver with my GPU not clocked yet, Company of Heroes runs for sometime before locking so does the Gold MTW2 demo.

Now we turned down the CPU to the standard 1.8 GHz and the Gold MTW2 demo ran well.

So why would DirectX 9.0c games cause an overclocked CPU and Ram to lock up? When it runs DirectX 9.0b BI expansion of Rome with 20,000 troops on max settings (causing occassional slow down) and the overclocked CPU and Ram run fine for hours, where as on the Gold MTW2 demo, it wouldn't even play the intro vids for Pavia and Agincourt?

Ok so now will try increasing the OC in tried stages, anyone got any ideas as to why an overclocked system would fail with DirectX 9.0c games??

[Pent uP Rage]

video codecs perhaps? I think SP2 upgraded or added support for certain newer codecs. I COULD be mistaken though!
If you were overclocked and it wouldn't run, I'd say run everything at stock and try it, but you've done that already! That's one helluva strange problem there.
Try DLing SP2 and burning it to a CD, then putting it on your gaming rig. SOME games REQUIRE SP2.

[Frost, colonel]

Ok system now stable with all DirectX 9.0c games with CPU@2.8Ghz (i've lost 80hz boo hoo!) GPU nicely OC as before!
A strange error for sure!!!!

[Markas]

Bear in mind some games (like RTW) dislike write combining/enabling. I had this problem and now I tend to turn it off permanently. You can find it in Control panel->display->troubleshooting. Just untick the box.

[Aristocrat]

The vagaries of overclocking, 1mhz over a certain limit and things go crazy most of the time.