2600 has problems and reboots on specific games...

[Mark 2007]

Hello!
I have a Sapphire 2600 Pro and my computer seems to have problems on specific games, mostly on Source/Steam games. When I'm playing Counter-Strike Source or The Ship for about 5 minutes, my computer will freeze or reboot. Sometimes it happens as soon as I click to start a game and my videocard swtiches to 3D mode. And in the game Viva Pinata, my computer always reboots when I click to exit to desktop.

What's unusual is that I've been playing Call of Duty 4 and Conflict Denied Ops flawlessly with no reboots or problems. That surprises me because it seems that those games are more taxing on the videocard than other games.

It's worth noting that the freezing/rebooting that happens in The Ship is quite distinctive: Some of objects (such as chairs) flicker black a few moments before the crash, and some of the text can become garbled.

The first thing I thought was that it was a problem with my power supply. I thought it would be because I'm using a 20-pin PSU on a 24-pin motherboard, so I bought one of those 20-pin to 24-pin converters but there has been no change. My voltages seem to be okay. Although buying a brand new PSU looks like a quick and easy fix, I still have my doubts on if it's the exact cause of my problems. What are your opinions, folks from Legit Reviews?

Thanks,
Mark

[Apoptosis]

Obviously something isn't right... Check the drivers and make sure they are the latest for your motherboard chipset and video card. Also be sure to check for motherboard BIOS updates. Maybe reset the BIOS to optimized defaults in case something got set wrong by acident in the BIOS. If it's still crashing after all that you might want to consider contacting Sapphire to RMA it as every so often a memory IC does go bad on a video card.

[Mark 2007]

Thanks very much Apoptosis for your reply. Much to my surprise, I managed to find a fix last night and now all my games are running smoothly. I'm glad, because I was considering buying a new PSU and new RAM in an attempt to fix it.

So what was the problem? I came across a post during a google search about a "PagedPoolSize" error with Half Life Episode 2, and upon further searching it's apparently a problem for other games too, such as Battlefield. So if anyone has the same problem as me (and I think it only happens with folks with 1gb of ram) then simply do the following:

Start > Run > Regedit
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management
On the PagedPoolSize key, enter the value 10000000
Reboot.

(Of course, if you're reading this and you're not experienced with editing the registry, then back up your stuff before going further!)

Thanks,
Mark