Games Problems

[chris93000]

Hi,

My computer runs pefectly when I am on word or msn, internet playing music etc. it multitasks very well indeed but when it comes to playing on games its not so good.

At first when i installed colin mcrae rally 2005 on it it ran perfectly with very smooth graphics on full detail. then after a few weeks whilst in game play the whole game would speed up and me not being able to control the car. It would do this every now and then and i would loose control of the car but now its like that 100% of the time.eg 30 mph looks like 100mph. It also did the same thing on toca race driver 3 - fine at first now unplayable.

I want to be able to sort this problem out without wiping the data off the hard disk and re installing windows because it takes so long setting it back up again.

Any help would be much appreciated as I am loosing my patience with it now !

Below is my computer specification:

AMD Athlon X2 4200+ dual core
2x nvidia 7600 GT SLi
MSI K9N PLatinum motherboard
160gb maxtor sata hard disk (partitioned)
2gb ddr 2 ram
ASUS QuiteWrite 52x rewriter
NEC DVD-Rewriter 3500
600 watt psu

thanks, chris.

 

[JoeM076]

Hmm, your computer specifications aren't bad so I'm not to sure why this would be happening. The problem may be coming from your hard drive, and you should try, I know you don't want to, but it could help narrow the issue down.
- Just in case, see if your power supply has enough wattage to power your computer.
- Run this and post what the wattage came out to be.
http://educations.newegg.com/tool/psucalc/index.html

I'm pretty sure it's not the amount of wattage, but it may be that your power supply is bad. I think though that it is most likely a hard drive issue considering that you said the graphics in your games come out fine.

 

[chris93000]

I did the test and came out with a reccomended wattage of 419W. Its a 600W psu but the thing is that it is a cheap one which cost around £17 so whether that is problem or not i dont know.

I had a good mess around with it last night reinstalling the games and adjusting the graphics settings but had no luck.

I guy at work told me that the problem could be that my graphics cards are made by 2 different makes. "Palit" and "Xpert Vision" they are made by. But ive read that as long as they are the same chip and if one runs slower or has a lesser amount of RAM then the "better" one will run at the other card's pace. I got the first card 12 months ago last christmas and the second about 8 months ago as an upgrade so i could use SLi.

Does anyone think a reinstallation may be a good idea? As I have had games working properly on the same hardware configuration.

chris.

 

[JoeM076]

Could you possibly try running the game with just ONE graphic card and see if the problem is being caused by your graphic cards in SLI.

 

[chris93000]

ive tried both cards induvidually and still get the same result

 

[JoeM076]

Hmm..so I guess this tells us that the problem is not your graphics card, and some other peice of hardware or software.
- Is your computer up-to-date?
My only other suggestion is to try another game and see what happens. If you get the same result, it may be a hard drive problem.
- Is your hard drive 10,000RPM?
Could you possibly try to install a different hard drive in your PC and play the game on it?
Also, to omit your disk drive from the problem, try downloading a demo of a game and play it. See if you get the same issue. If you don't, your disk drive may be what is causing the problem.

 

[chris93000]

yes ive already tried it on another game, Toca Race Driver 3 and is exactly the same. The hard drive is a Maxtor diamondmax 20 160gb and spins at 7200RPM not 10,000.

Im currently in the process of backing up all my impoprtant stuff photos etc onto an old computer and then re install windows xp. If no luck after that I will look into getting a second hard drive and using the one I have at the moment as a seperate Local Disk (D) rather than having just 1 drive partitoned.

 

[chris93000]

and yes i think most things are up-to-date. did the nvidia drivers the other day as they were about 5 months out of date !

 

[Didou]

Have you tried enabling vertical sync (commonly known as vsync) &/or playing with the CPU affinity once the game is launched ?

 

[chris93000]

yes ive always had that vertical sync on in the control panel.

 

[Didou]

Have you tried the AMD Dual Core optimizer ?

 

[chris93000]

downloaded it but cant understand what it does

 

[Didou]

It generally fixes speed problems that certain games have when running on dual core (or more) computers.