9800 Pro - Freezing & looping in games.

[Colin Wilson]

9800 Pro
AMD 64 3.2Ghz
Antec Sonata PSU
1 Gb RAM
ASUS K8V SE Motherboard
Creative SB Live!
250Gb SATA Western Digital HD

Often when I play a more modern game (Quake 4, Doom 3, Half life 2), it
freezes for about 10 seconds, and while its frozen the sound loops
repeatedly.

It happens particuarly when a baddy attacks, or a door opens, etc. It's
almost like a new sound - like the monster's 'Grrrr!', or the door's
'Pssssffft!' somehow tips it over the edge.

So what tends to happen is I'm sneaking along a corridor, a monster
attacks, and just when he's thrown a fireball or whatever, it locks up and
(with intervals of about a second) goes 'Gr.. Gr.. Gr.. Gr.. Gr.. Gr..
Gr.. Grrrrrrr!!!!'

And then it kills me because I couldn't react when the system was frozen.

This has been bugging me for ages, and I've tried everything I can think
of to try to sort it out. It seems to happen whatever size I run the game
at (800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 etc.) I've tried different sound cards.
I've got the latest Catalyst driversm etc. etc.

Has anyone experienced problems like this? Does anyone know of some more
possible solutions??

TIA,

 

[Skipai Otter]

9800 Pro
AMD 64 3.2Ghz
Antec Sonata PSU
1 Gb RAM
ASUS K8V SE Motherboard
Creative SB Live!
250Gb SATA Western Digital HD

Often when I play a more modern game (Quake 4, Doom 3, Half life 2), it
freezes for about 10 seconds, and while its frozen the sound loops
repeatedly.

It happens particuarly when a baddy attacks, or a door opens, etc. It's
almost like a new sound - like the monster's 'Grrrr!', or the door's
'Pssssffft!' somehow tips it over the edge.

So what tends to happen is I'm sneaking along a corridor, a monster
attacks, and just when he's thrown a fireball or whatever, it locks up and
(with intervals of about a second) goes 'Gr.. Gr.. Gr.. Gr.. Gr.. Gr..
Gr.. Grrrrrrr!!!!'

And then it kills me because I couldn't react when the system was frozen.

This has been bugging me for ages, and I've tried everything I can think
of to try to sort it out. It seems to happen whatever size I run the game
at (800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 etc.) I've tried different sound cards.
I've got the latest Catalyst driversm etc. etc.

Has anyone experienced problems like this? Does anyone know of some more
possible solutions??

TIA,

I had that problem in playing a game but the main cause for me was that I
had Disk-keeper doing it's thing and the HDD's couldn't keep up with both
things. That and having huge files makes things slow down even with
diskeeper so yeah. You haven't got anything running in the background or
such that would slow the PC down at all?

 

[Colin Wilson]

I had that problem in playing a game but the main cause for me was that I
had Disk-keeper doing it's thing and the HDD's couldn't keep up with both
things.

Hi Skipai,

Thanks for the suggestion. I thought about what could be doing something
like that, and tried disabling "AVG Resident Shield" - the bit of AVG
anti-virus that continually monitors for viruses - before running Quake 4.

With AVG Resident Shield running it would do the freeze/loop thing every
few minutes, or even more on busy level.

With it disabled it doesn't seem to do it at all, and I managed to play
Quake 4 for several hours last night with no problems

 

[Skipai Otter]

Hi Skipai,

Thanks for the suggestion. I thought about what could be doing something
like that, and tried disabling "AVG Resident Shield" - the bit of AVG
anti-virus that continually monitors for viruses - before running Quake 4.

With AVG Resident Shield running it would do the freeze/loop thing every
few minutes, or even more on busy level.

With it disabled it doesn't seem to do it at all, and I managed to play
Quake 4 for several hours last night with no problems

Yeah, the other things that could limit frames and the main cause on XP is
the whole logging it loves to do. NTFS logging, application logging, files
accessed, errors, etc, etc, etc.....

Those can be stoppped but it be hard to find a problem once one turns up
though. I use NAV and never had a problem with it scanning with games
before. But Diskeeper pushed it..

Anyways, no problem.

 

[abc]

Hi Skipai,

Thanks for the suggestion. I thought about what could be doing something
like that, and tried disabling "AVG Resident Shield" - the bit of AVG
anti-virus that continually monitors for viruses - before running Quake 4.

With AVG Resident Shield running it would do the freeze/loop thing every
few minutes, or even more on busy level.

With it disabled it doesn't seem to do it at all, and I managed to play
Quake 4 for several hours last night with no problems

I have played all of those games with a 9800 pro, XP2500+, 1.5 GB RAM, and
AVG resident shield with no problems.

Are you sure you don't have it set to "scan all files"?

Most had some slowdowns, but that was just my system.

 

[Colin Wilson]

I have played all of those games with a 9800 pro, XP2500+, 1.5 GB RAM, and
AVG resident shield with no problems.

Are you sure you don't have it set to "scan all files"?

Yes - it's not set to scan all files. It just has the standard settings
set.

I was quite suprised to find that disabling it seemed to make the
difference for me. When I've got a moment I'll do some more investigating.

The other thing I did the same day was upgrade from Catalyst 5.10 to
Catalyst 5.13, but even after updating Catalyst, rebooting, etc. it was
still giving the problem - but after disabling AVG resident shield it
suddenly stopped. I guess that even if it's not actually scanning the
files, it's still hooking the file APIs etc. and that might be making a
difference?

It would be interesting to find out what the root cause is. Whatever the
reason is, it *shouldn't* do the 10 second freeze/loop thing. I could
understand if disk access performance problems occasionally caused a small
glitch or stutter, but not this.

It would be nice if the manufacture could find the underlying problem and
fix it. But which manufacturer? ATI? Creative? Asus? Id Software?

Anyway, as long as my games now play smoothly I'm a happy bunny!

 

[pigdos]

After about 6 months of using my 9800 Pro 128MB it began to have problems
similar to what you're describing. When I felt the back of the card
underneath the GPU, it was burning hot. I took off the heatsink and noticed
all the TIM (heatsink grease) had dried to a fine, flakey powder, which is
great for pie crusts but not so great for heat xfer. I cleaned off the old
TIM and put on some Arctic Silver III, re-installed the heatsink, added a
Pentium ball-bearing fan and proceeded to overclock the 9800 Pro -- never
had a problem since.

 

[Colin Wilson]

When I felt the back of the card underneath the GPU, it was burning hot. I
took off the heatsink and noticed all the TIM (heatsink grease) had dried
to a fine, flakey powder, which is great for pie crusts but not so great
for heat xfer.

Thanks - I'll check it out - but I don't *think* it's that. It happens
just as bad when I first turn the computer on and everything's cold.

I did some more checking, with AVG on and off. It's not a magic solution
- it still happens sometimes, but it's better with it off, and with AVG
shut down, and as many other background processes as possible disabled
it's now nearly perfect - certainly very useable.