New system build. Still problems

[dogboy73]

I recently upgraded the guts of my system;

MSI K8N Neo2 NForce3 motherboard (Replaced my ancient old Gigabyte mobo)
AMD 64 Winchester 3000 CPU (Previously I had an AMD XP 2000)
1Gb 400MHZ PC3200 DDRAM (Previously 512MB 266MHZ PC2100)

I retained my 380W Antec PSU & 40GB IDE HD

On the plus the side the stuttering has all but gone but the game still crashes in exactly the same way as before i.e. system hard locks, I get a blank screen & I have to reset.

As a performance test for my new system I re-installed Far Cry. This ran fine with everything maxed out (And it looked fantastic). no such luck with HL2 though.

Any suggestions on the crash problem? (Thank God I finally got rid of the stutters! It seemed in my case throwing some extra raw power at the problem worked a treat).

 

[Beavis]

I am having lockups as well.

I figured it up this morning and have spent too much money in the last couple of weeks trying to get this damn game to be stable:

Motherboard and chip: Asus A8V Deluxe with AMD64 3500+ ($383.00)
RAM: Corsair 1gig 3200 ($150.00)
Video card: Radeon 9800Pro ($100.00 from a friend)
New Power supply: Thermatake 420 Watt ($40.00)
Half-Life 2: ($55.00)
My time: At least 80 hours of surfing numerous forums and trying different "fixes". (Seeing as how my time is worthless to Valve I won't figure out the cost)