BF2 overheating my video card

[TrinitronX]

:yuck:
alright... here's what's been happening so far. I can play the game perfectly fine on low settings (aside from occasional connection problems), but I recently upgraded from having 512MB RAM to 1.5Gb of RAM. After doing this, I noticed a major improvement in my FPS and video lag that I had before (when textures were loading from the hard drive..etc.. ). So, after finding that I could run the game very flawlessly on low settings, I decided to try running higher settings to see if my system could handle it. Well.. I changed everything to medium/high settings, and I could play fine, but after about 10 or so mins, I had horrible texture corruption, coupled with objects flickering in and out of existence, followed by a lockup to a blue screen with a bunch of horrible high pitched squealing noises coming from my headphones :eek2:. I had to totally reboot the system, because there was no hope of recovering from such a horrible crash. Needless to say, I tried setting my video settings a bit lower, with mostly medium/low settings this time. I could play fine, but after about a half hour or two, again I had the objects fading in and out of existence, followed by texture corruption, and now this time featuring random blackness enveloping the screen in strange patterns, which flickered a lot when I moved my view. Again, after this had been happening for a while, comes the horrible blue screen with strange off colored pixels around the edges, and more horrid squealing.
Again, I lowered my settings, this time turning off what they call "texture filtering" (really anisotropic filtering), setting it to "low" which really sets it to trilinear. This time I made it to about two hours before the symptoms showed up. This time, my computer didn't horrbly die though, as I avoided the blue squealing screen by exiting the game before it happened. However, before doing this, I opened up my computer case while still running the game (probably not the smartest thing to do.. but I'm very careful :mrgreen: ). I felt the heatsink on my radeon card, and with little surprise, I found it to be burning hot. And I do mean burning.. it kinda hurt :crap: .
I'm thouroughly convinced now that BF2 has effectively caused my video card to overheat to a hideous extent. I don't think there's anything I could do about it besides turning down my settings (without spending money ).
If anyone knows of a possible fix for this, while still allowing the medium settings to run, please post it here .

Just to give you an idea of the strange blackness I describe, here's a pic of it in action. Although this isn't a pic taken from my computer, it's the exact same thing happening basically: http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/3883/reinstallhigh4og.jpg

[Drayu]

what kind of card?

[Multiplex]

What kind of card.. and did you buy it "overclocked" or did you let someone come in later and overclock it.

What type of processor? What is your front side bus speed.

What type of RAM... what is the clock speed of it?

How many case fans do you have... where are the located and are they pushing or pulling air.

[CHAOS]

does your vid GPU have a fan on it or just a heatsink? There are alot of addons that you can add to your card to help keep it cool.

www.frozencpu.com

[wihadmin]

Nutz72 is having this exact same problem. He hasnt' figured out how to fix it either.

[TrinitronX]

Ok.. sorry about not posting my specs and such, I was in a bit of a hurry to post this because I had to run errands earlier today.
My system is as follows:
3.2Ghz P4 with HTT
1.5Gigs DDR PC3200 RAM
ATI Radeon 9800pro 128MB (running catalyst 5.7.. absolutely no overclocking)
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2
Western Digital 250 GB HDD

I have an Intel i875P chipset, running an effective Front Side Bus speed of 200 MHz. My RAM is composed of 512 MB of pre-installed Dell PC3200 DIMMs, and 1 GB of: pqi TURBO DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR @ 400MHz (PC 3200). It's running at default timings of 2.5-3-3-7, and the pqi RAM has heat spreaders on each DIMM, so I doubt they're the problem :smile:.
Nothing on my system is overclocked, because I have no need of it, and I don't want to do anything risky to my hardware until it needs to be replaced.

My system is a Dell Dimension XPS Generation 2, so the case does not have the added vents on the top of the case like the later generations (3 and up). (it also doesn't have the pretty LEDs on the front faceplate either.. but who really needs those wasting power, and slightly heating up the air coming into the airfeed vent :D). The cooling system is pretty good compared to normal PCs (I'm not talking insane uber PCs with watercooling etc..). The case design is very nice because it pretty much separates the major heat generating components into separate compartments. The power supply is in the bottom of the case in a totally separate compartment, with two fans dedicated to its cooling. Next, we have the processor in the main chamber, covered by a heatsink and fan with a fan shroud (to create higher velocity airflow and separate it from the rest of the components. There are two fans dedicated to the processor chamber cooling. Then, there's the front intake fan bringing air from outside into the main chamber and past the AGP and PCI cards. And finally, the heatsink and fan for the Radeon 9800pro (which is getting pretty hot during BF2 gameplay).
There you have it.. a guided tour of my PC :hehehe:

EDIT: ok.. nevermind.. my Bus speed is actually 800MHz according to my BIOS.. the speed of 200MHz was reported by memtest86 when I ran it to test my new RAM.. considering that memtest is pretty old.. and since it probably doesn't know the meaning of hyperthreading, I'm going to trust my BIOS on this one.. I'm guessing memtest was only using one logical processor. I knew something looked fishy when I saw that.

[wihadmin]

I also have a 9800Pro 128MB. Mine's going strong. Only get an occasional flashing texture. That's it. Nutz is on a 9700 Pro.

[TrinitronX]

What are the settings you're running the game at?

[TC HEAT]

I had same prob when i put dual channel mem...try putting ur memory in diff slots and see what happens

[TrinitronX]

Tried switching the pairs to the other 2 paired slots.. still getting the symptoms :tongue:. I'm pretty much convinced that it's my video card overheating though.. the symptoms are consistent, and it happens after a period of play based upon the stress put on the card. I cleaned out the dust on the heatsink, and it seems like it's taking a bit longer to happen.. but it still happens :(.
I don't really want to go out and get a different heatsink and fan because it's probably not worth the trouble. I guess I'll try setting everything to as high as I can without having problems

[monos]

Tried switching the pairs to the other 2 paired slots.. still getting the symptoms :tongue:. I'm pretty much convinced that it's my video card overheating though.. the symptoms are consistent, and it happens after a period of play based upon the stress put on the card. I cleaned out the dust on the heatsink, and it seems like it's taking a bit longer to happen.. but it still happens :(.
I don't really want to go out and get a different heatsink and fan because it's probably not worth the trouble. I guess I'll try setting everything to as high as I can without having problems

people have reported trouble with the catalyst drivers creating too much heat try uninstalling and using the omega drivers my game runs smotther with the omega's

[RiverSteve]

Brother I got fed up with ATI and replaced the 800xl I had with a 6800gt when the full version came out and haven't had any more problems at all.
I know this doesn't help you out much but I tried everything with mine and still had intermittent problems that I couldn't pinpoint as overheating or crappy drivers. ATI support is nonexistent.

[Father Goose]

Not to sound like an ass, but have you made sure that the fan is working on the card? I just built my wife a new computer, and when I checked out her old Radeon 9000, the fan was absolutely frozen- the bearings are shot. No wonder even the Sims 2 was getting some artifacting/speckling!

You could turn the fan with your fingers, but there is no way that little motor was turning it.

[Kossori]

Brother I got fed up with ATI and replaced the 800xl I had with a 6800gt when the full version came out and haven't had any more problems at all.
I know this doesn't help you out much but I tried everything with mine and still had intermittent problems that I couldn't pinpoint as overheating or crappy drivers. ATI support is nonexistent.

I don't know. I've had my Radeon 9500 (overclocked to 9700) for a good 3 years now and I have never had any problems with the drivers or anything. Then again I have always used the omega drivers as opposed to the base ATI stuff.

[TrinitronX]

Yeah... I definately checked the fan.. and it's running fine.. I did find a nice balance.. so I'm able to run medium settings by turning off AA, and everything to either medium or low. I may also try the omega drivers too. Now that I've kinda worked around the overheating problem as best I can, I'm still getting an exit to desktop after running the game for a while (like around 4 or so hours of play :yaya: ). I'm wondering if it's related to the overheating too.. or maybe that's just a problem with BF2. I can deal with having the game exit after that amount of time anyways though.. Usually that's when I'd quit anyways.

[RiverSteve]

Brother I got fed up with ATI and replaced the 800xl I had with a 6800gt when the full version came out and haven't had any more problems at all.
I know this doesn't help you out much but I tried everything with mine and still had intermittent problems that I couldn't pinpoint as overheating or crappy drivers. ATI support is nonexistent.

I don't know. I've had my Radeon 9500 (overclocked to 9700) for a good 3 years now and I have never had any problems with the drivers or anything. Then again I have always used the omega drivers as opposed to the base ATI stuff.

You're able to run everything in the high settings with no problems? Wow even on the medium settings with the 800xl 256 I had problems even with the omega drivers.

[Nutz72]

I'm plague with this video problem too. Exact same thing happens.

I tried the latest Omega drivers on my 9700pro and problems still persist. I still get regular lockups and video artifacts and it generally goes berzerk. It's even made my monitor snap and pop once or twice. I thought I was taking fire and dove for cover. LOL

Giga-Byte SINXP1394
P4 2.4Ghz OC to 2.93Ghz
2Gig of Corsair Twinx
9700pro 128MB
Realtek onboard sound

[TrinitronX]

Ok.... wow... today sucked.
Let me explain all that happened. Last night, I was playing bf2. The game has been running fine more or less (except for the occasional crash to desktop), but then right as I was switching to the tv missile mode in an attack chopper to take out a tank, something really bad happened. My screen froze up, turned black, then tried to crash to desktop.. however, this time it didn't succeed in getting all the way there. I'm guessing the video card was horribly overheated still... even with my low settings :yuck: . As the game died, it was trying to change the display mode back to my normal one, but since it was overheated.. I don't think it got there fully. What I saw after the black screen was a hideous 8 bit color representation of my desktop, which was at the totally wrong resolution. I somehow had control over my mouse, and tried to shut it down.. but it froze up, so I was forced to do a hard shutdown. When I rebooted, I was greeted with the error "Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"
Well... that's just great. In the process of everything malfunctioning, it seems my system hive was probably written to somehow. I had to go search for my windows CD, pop it in and boot from it.. then try to get the repair console up.. but I'm then greeted with another message. This one says that it can't find my HDD. Well... I got out my dell diagnostics CD, booted that, ran all the diagnostics it has, to find that my HDD is fine, along with my other hardware. I tried getting the repair console again, just to make sure it wasn't just a strange glitch.. but still no luck.
So, I had to call tech support to see what the problem was. I got someone from texas (wow.. in the US!), and he told me to go into my bios, disable the RAID controller on my HDD, and just have it as the primary SATA drive. It seems that the windows CD wasn't loading my RAID drivers.. silly windows. Anyways.. I finally got the recovery console to come up, I ran "chkdsk /r" and it ran for a few hours. It was able to fix any errors it came across, so now that is why I'm sitting here typing this.
That was a major pain in the ass to do all of that, but at least I got my computer back.

So.. the moral of this story is that EA and DICE need to fix the game, to stop this type of thing from happening!!