I am unable to play any 3D games eg. Call of Duty. I have installed the most up to date NVIDIA drivers and the DirectX 9.c from Microsoft. Some times the game plays for about 1 minute then freezes, other times it will not play at all. PixelView GF FX5200 128MB DDR 8x AGP 80GB HD AMD Athlon XP 2.01Ghz EliteGroup K7VTA3 V6.0 - mainboard - ATX - KT333 Windows XP Sp2
Sounds like you might have some heat issues. [google]Motherboard Monitor[/google] is a great program that can monitor your CPU temps. It might be a little overwhelming at a first look, but it tracks your CPU temp (among other things). If you see it hanging past 60*C under load, that's likely the culprit. If that is the problem, make sure you've got good airflow through the case. An untidy mess of cabling can hinder the airflow. The second thing could be that the case fans aren't moving air in the same direction. Ideally, this would be pulling in from the front and blowing it out the back. If those are covered, you should look at the installation of your heatsink, or an entirely new unit altogether, especially if you're using the stock AMD cooler. If the CPU checks out, try some different video card drivers. The newer drivers are geared more for the GeForce 6 series than the FX line. Try some drivers a few releases back and see if that doesn't do it for you. You might also consider trying that card out in another system to make sure you don't happen to have a bad card.
I’ll give that a go. But I don’t think it’s a heat problem. The case has an LCD display and states that the CPU temp. is 79F (thinks that’s around 28C).
sorry one last thing The board APG slot is 4X, but the card is 8X. Could this be the problem? The cards manufactures Pixelview states that the card is backward compatible.
What happens when a game won't play at all? It could be that your video card is overheating as these are more vunerable to heat issues than Athlon XP cpus.
no, 8x AGP cards are backwards compatible. However if your BIOS or drivers are set to make the card run at 8x, that could be the cause. See if you can change it to 4x.
That may not be correct, especially since the newer Athlon's have an on-die temp sensor that can be read. If it's got a probe thats stuck to the side of the CPU core, then that would be valid...however, if it's just drifting out in the case, that doesn't mean anything.
