Why does it play so bad on my computer

A

asdasd12345

Guest
Bought CS source the other day. My computer crashes before it even finishes the stress test. I guess that means its very stressed. I have a athlon 2400+ with 512 MB PC2100 memory, a geforce3 ti200 64mb video card and when i try and play the computer crashes and resets anytime something interesting is happening in the game. will i have to totally upgrade to play?
 
It's your video card. The geforce 3 ti200 64MB is considered a low end card now. I suggest saving up for a new card, like the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro/XT which cost around $200 to $250 American. I have a Radeon 9800 Pro and I can run the game smoothly with all the details set to high.
 
Its not his video card, its something conflicting with the system.
 
Random restarts are usually because of over heating. Intense gameplay could overheat your system. After your pc has been running for a few hours, restart and go into the BIOS. Look around it for some temperatures, make sure all temps are below 60 degrees C. That is the absolute max anything should be. If your hardware is only just lower, I would recommend buying a new fan anyway. It's better to be safe than sorry :)
 
asdasd12345 said:
Bought CS source the other day. My computer crashes before it even finishes the stress test. I guess that means its very stressed. I have a athlon 2400+ with 512 MB PC2100 memory, a geforce3 ti200 64mb video card and when i try and play the computer crashes and resets anytime something interesting is happening in the game. will i have to totally upgrade to play?
Click to expand...
Your video card is REALLY bad.
If you upgrade to a radeon 9800 pro you should be in excellent shape. It's around $180
 
Yeah I can play CS 1.6 on quite high resolutions and it goes perfect until i hit some smoke and then it goes down to 20 fps. although recently i did install a new secondary hard drive, could that be screwing up my comp any?
 
asdasd12345 said:
Yeah I can play CS 1.6 on quite high resolutions and it goes perfect until i hit some smoke and then it goes down to 20 fps. although recently i did install a new secondary hard drive, could that be screwing up my comp any?
Click to expand...
Anythings possible but its unlikely... Id check your vpu and cpu heatsinks, maybe you accidentally did something to them when putting in your new hd.
 
New graphics card is pretty much your only answer, unless your going to buy a water cooling kit and overclock the crap out of everything (im thinking a 300 - 400 mhz overclock on your vpu! )


but i recommend a new card..
 
Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you to buy another computer or anything like that! Although they are correct in saying that your video card is the weak link! even so, if everything was working right, your system should not crash, regardless of the age of your vid card.

Since you are trying to run a high-end game on a low end system, you have to tweak your system out as much as possible. For starters, make sure you have the very latest drivers installed for all your hardware, in particular your video and sound drivers. Make sure you uninstall your old vid drivers before you install your new ones. You must also make sure that you are not running any other apps in the background. Check your system for viruses and spyware, and clean them out. Try running some benchmarks such as 3Dmark 2001 and compare your scores to similar systems to make sure your system is up to speed. you may want to try overclocking your card a bit, but first you have to make sure heat isn't a problem. Open up your box and make sure it is clean inside. blow everything out with compressed air, and make sure your fans and heat sinks are completely dust free.

When it comes to the game itself, I'm afraid you don't have the horsepower to run much eye-candy. Dial your resolution right down, along with all detail settings. Check which directx the game is running. You may want to set it down to DX7 to maximize framerates. There are many other tweaks that can be done to the game through console commands. you will find more detail on those throughout these forums and others.

Try all those things and see what happens!

Good luck!
 
OK I checked the temp like you said and after it crashed the CPU temp was 63c which is apparently too high. I am just using the standard fan that came with the CPU when I bought it. What can I do to bring it down quite a lot? Just buy a gigantic new fan?
 
Lol on a GF4MX440, a Pentium 2,8Ghz and 256RAM the stress test ran at 111FPS (the high FPS comes from the lack of effects presented in the level as directx 7 cards like this dont support them, but still the results not bad not bad; most of the game wont be packed with them [effects])
 
It's not his video card thats making it slow. my other comp uses and GeForce 2 MX 64mb and it runs fine just isnt as pretty. Is the RAM you are using faulty? run memtest overnight so see if you get any errors.

you can get memtest
here - http://www.majorgeeks.com/download350.html
 
video card...

what settings are you playing it at? (high medium low)
 
obsiously it's the video card. It's only 64 MB. Thats horrid to be running a high quality 3d game like CS Source. Get a 128 card or higher. I have a Radeon 9700 Pro 128 MB i get 70 fps in source.
 
His video card isnt the problem; like someone said earlier, its either the heat or somethings just conflicting in the system. My gf4 ti4200 is 64mb's and it runs the game fine, albeit a bit slow.
 
I just went out and bought a new fan. Got the best one they had and lowered the temp to 42C from 63C. However, it still crashed. When it crashes this blue screen pops up for a millisecond, and you can tell it has some kind of error message in it, but the computer restarts before I can get a chance to read it, so I have no clue what kind of error message it says.
 
Ok well since you can run other games without crashing, it might be an error on your hard-drive. Maybe try running Disk Check and also defragging. You can run Disk-Check by going to: My Computer/Right-clicking your hard-drive/ clicking the Tools Tab/ Error-Checking

You may have to restart your computer for disk-checking to run.

Try running this program and see if it can run stable. It's designed to stress out your entire system for as long as you like, minutes, hours, even days. Overclockers use it as a good system stress test.

http://www.download.com/SANDRA-Standard/3000-2086_4-10311006.html?tag=lst-0-1

It's even got some diagnostics features on it to help you figure out what the problem may be.

If Disk-check and defragging don't fix it, and Sandra runs ok, then it's a problem with Steam, or CS:S.
 
OK I got it to run. For anyone who cares this is what happened. When I downloaded source it told me that my videocard drivers were out of date and it redirected me to a site where I had to download the new drivers. I did this and of course it didnt work like you all know. So I went to the Gainward site and downloaded what they said were the latest drivers, I again got the Steam message saying my drivers were out of date but I played it anyway, and it got thru the stress test with 91fps and I can play source now, not really that well however.

The morale of this story is that if Steam says your drivers are out of date, that doesnt make it so.
 
i heard that nvidia is much worse for playing it, would my computer cope with good framerates?

amd 64-bit 3000+ 512 ram
and nVidia geforce fx5900xt

im getting really adgitated
 
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