crashing to desktop while gaming
 

My computer problems never seem to end! Anyway, it's pretty much like the title says. I'll be playing warhammer or fallout and it just randomly crashes. Every 20 mins to an hour. With warhammer at least, when it crashes I have to restart the computer as the video is all messed up. Screen anomalies and some icons and background not showing. If I try to start WAR again before restarting it says my video card doesn't meet the reqs (which is does).

It's a newly built computer. My vidcard is an ASUS EAH4850. I tried reinstalling the drivers.

Both games have problems with crashing for a lot of people. But the whole glitched graphics after a crash should definitely be on my end. What do you think?

(I also get the blue screen of death once every few days, if that matters)

intel core 2 duo E8400
ECS P43T-A2
DDR2 Corsair 2x2gbs
win XP

Is that video card NVIDIA or ATI? I can't tell haha.

Definitely sounds like something is flaky with the video unit :-/ I don't like the "does not meet the reqs" after a crash.

It can be hard to track down. One cause that is often overlooked is the power requirements of the videocard.
You you get the blue screen of death during none-games use could indicate that the cause isn't the games but something else.
If the motherboard has built-in devices (VGA, LAN, audio ...) that are not used then make sure that they are disabled in the bios.

Best of luck.
Yours
Zweiblumen

ATI

No blue screen or anything else during normal computer usage (so far).

My power should be fine unless there's a loose connection somewhere.

What comes to my mind are:

- Motherboard drivers (I couldn't tell from your post wether you've updated them)
- Insufficient power from the powersupply
- Overheating

While I've never had an ATI vga card, I've had troubles with all of the above before. Although I don't think I've ever had video problems after the game in question crashed (unless the videocard driver crashed, which results in message by windows telling you to restart).

Try to rule out any of the above, each of them can cause weird behavior.

I didn't find the power requirements for that card but 400+ Watts is very common for gameing video cards.

Since the problem only occurs when playing games it could be also be heat related.
You could try lowering the video settings in the game to see if that makes any diffrence.

Yours
ZB

I just put this together, so all my drivers are very recent (from the CDs that came with em anyway).

My power supply is new and rated for 500V or whatever, it should be more than sufficient.

I should say, I'm pretty sure it only happens during gaming, I mostly use it for gaming, so I'm just not, not gaming very much when it's on. If that makes sense...

Windows never told me to restart.

I've of course, lowered the vid settings in game.

I don't think it's overheating, I've had that problem before and it didn't act like this.

I'm leaning to some sort of driver problem, but have no clue what else to do except reformat (i've tried registry cleaners).

If there are no crashes when running other CPU/RAM intensive apps, it's most likely a video card problem. New card? Could be bad RAM or something else which you can do nothing about except get a replacement. Sounds a lot like overheating symptoms as well. If you have another video card handy try swapping it out.

So this is interesting. I went to the catalyst control center and slid the slider for quality to performance and it did the graphics glitch thing again (I tried putting it back where it was, didn't matter). I had to restart to get it back to normal. WTH??

Well, you've definitely nailed it down to the video card. If not the drivers, I'm guessing defective hardware, get a RMA.

You said all drivers were as current as the ones included on CDs with the equipment. That's never good. By the time you get a boxed product, the included drivers are out of date. I NEVER use them. Always go to manufacturer web sites and get the newest available drivers. For the vid card just go to AMD/ATI. Hope that helps!

The dreaded CTD. I suffered through CTDs in every game I played until I bought my latest PC. My current PC is about 2 years old and rarely CTDs (maybe once every 6 months). My old one did it 5 times a day in any game and I never found out what it was (my greatest guess is the videocard was the culprit).

Other than reformatting and reinstalling Windows, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Driver updates can help in some cases. Go to System properties, advanced tab, then click on Settings under Startup and Recovery. Uncheck Automatically Restart, and uncheck send an administrative alert. That may help. Also go to Error Reporting and Disable Error reporting. That might help as well.

Thanks Las.

I went to their site Drivers & Software
But they don't list the 4850

Um... Just go to ATI/AMD.

Here:
Drivers & Tools | GAME.AMD.COM
-----Added 7/1/2009 at 09 : 12 : 41-----
Choose Radeon HD 4800 series

Thanks for proding me to upgrade to a slightly newer driver, it did help. CTDs are down a lot (still happens on occasion tho) but now I'm getting a new problem. The game does this weird thing, goes black, but its not a freeze or a crash. In all my years of gaming I've never had this happen before. I can hit ctrl alt dlt or the windows button and it pops up briefly, but not long enough for me to do anything. Especially since my computer gets all slow when it happens too. So I have to manually restart.

Windows/the computer itself is fine, cause when I hit my shutdown button, after a minute or so it forces the game to close and my mouse and desktop briefly return to normal until it shutsdown. Is there anyway to either force the game to close (mind you, without having to click anything with the mouse) or stop the computer from shutting down once its closed the game? I've tried ctrl Q and esc.

Anyone? Maybe I should start a new thread for this new problem.