OK guys, I'm just about at the end of my temper with this problem - therefore ANY help on this matter would be much appreciated:

On 15th December 2003 I purchased a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600XT with 256MB of DDR RAM for £153.48 inc. VAT (Which was an OK deal at the time). I was originally very happy with this card, as it was a big step up from my old GeForce 4 MX 440. However, during the summer I got a completely new computer - everything was new except the video card which I kept.

(NEW SPECS = 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4, 512mb DDR RAM, Abit UGURU Motherboard, On-Board sound, Toshiba 120GB HDD)

Now, the card had run fine on my old machine (to the best of my knowledge), but it seems now when I play certain games they lock up/freeze. I'm NOT totally sure its the machine however, as I never used to play many games on my old comp so I may have not noticed the video card messing up on certain games, but still I have had to put up with this random complete locking up of the machine on games such as Rome: Total War, Everquest 2 and now LOTR: The Battle for Middle Earth, but others such as HL2, Warcraft 3, and CS: Source never freeze. It seems to be as if the card is overheating, as the game runs fine and smoothly until random time intervals - not loading times or anything else, when I'm in the middle of playing! Since someone of the EQ2 boards suggested it was overheating I've added loads more fans (I now have 4 in total) so it shudn't be this . As I said I've had to put up with this for a long time and when I e-mailed the Sapphire ppl they never bloody replied !!!!

SO PLEASE:

Is it my computer (Motherboard?) ?

Is it my video card?

Is it something else?

ANY HELP WOULD BE SOOOOOO APPRECIATED

Thank-you

Lobster

Did you install the motherboard drivers when you built the computer? They should be installed right after windows. Have you installed the latest vidoe card drivers, Catalyst 4.12? Also see if the games you play have patches. Most do. You may also have your memory timmings set too aggressively.

Hey Dude!

I hae a Radeon 9600 XT Sapphire as well its 128 mb ram and i have
a P4 2.2Ghz with 1mb of onboard ram as well. I am having the same
problems with EQ2 as you are don't know what it is I think it may be
a memory leak not 100% sure either but one indication its not your
motherboard overheating because if you can turn your computer off when
it is locked up it should not restart right away if its still hot the computer
has a fail safe to prevent you from doint further damage. I am thinking its
almost the drivers ATI has or perhaps its a firewall issue. I am not sure if its the firewall or not i have norton internet security running in the background
but the computer only freezes up when i am in shop mode in EQ2 and i leave the computer sitting.

Let me know what you think

Had the same problem(with different games). Sometimes windows crashed while i did nothing, or when i just tried to open my computer. After one week of formatting and reinstalling windows marathon, (i must have done that over 10 times with different hdd arrangements) i got fed up, decided that it was a hardware problem(because even a clean win install wouldnt work correctly), and started removing hardware one by one, so that i find what goes wrong. Eventually, it was a stick of 512 mb ram. now, i think you have only 512, so its a problem to remove it
oh well.
if you made the pc show a bsod instead of restarting, you might get something out of it.
my computer->properties->advanced->startup and recovery settings->UNcheck Automatically restart
I *think* that should do it.And say here some of the info that the blue screen tells you.
If i remember correctly my errors were IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and many others, and many drivers were referenced, such as nc4disp.dll (which made my think wether it was my graphics card, but it wasnt). It was just faulty ram.
Good luck, i hope this helps.