BSOD During Crysis

Quote:
most benchmarks are done at Very High quality and high end video cards get 25-30 fps.. i was only running high details with 2x AA not 4x or 8x... so the 9800 GT does pretty well. 30 fps was an estimate for regular game play, during action scenes (blowing up a tank) it probably drops to 20 or so. and my GPU was at 64*C just prior to the BSOD and idk about ram temps, i dont have a program that reports those, if there is one... i have Gskill ram with heatspeaders on them and a decent exhaust fan, so all temps were good inside the case.

as for dropping the OC to stock.. ive run other games (they werent as demanding as crysis) on this OC.. never had a problem. i was thinking that having only 2gb of ram was the problem.

Quote:
this is what i thought was happening. it seemed that once the game "filled my ram" the game started to slow down a lot in performance, this also happened to be during a very demanding part of the game (lots of stuff blowing up, running around a lot). then it just went to BSOD. running High details uses more memory than medium and low cause of the extra stuff it has for textures and so on.

i just set everything to default, excpet the ram is underclocked on accident.. i forgot my motherboard sets it at 800mhz by default, got to change the voltage and speed real quick, then ill give it another go.

Quote:
crysis wont let me select 'very high' as an option with my system specs.

i figred i was just out of ram..

it seems i cant get my RAM to run at 1066.. my ram just matches my CPU FSB.. its running 800 mhz now.. i can only change my RAM by changing the ram multiplier or changing teh CPU base clock speed... grrrrrrrr

anyway.. so if i just used medium settings, that uses less ram and therefor wont cause the BSOD? its my theory until i get more ram, any ideas on that working?

played on medium settings, went really well. i checked my physcial mem usage during game play every once in a while and i was nearing 900mb+ of mem used for crysis alone, i would imagine high details would use more mem than that. my free memory was only in the ~500mb range at some points. i can see how easily high details during very active times in the game could max out my ram.. seems like if i want to run high details, i need more ram..

running 32bit XP... buy 1gb or 2? i ahve a friend with 32bit xp and he has 4gb of ram recognized by the OS, and a vidcard that is atleast 256mb.. how is that??!? anyway i could run 4gb with my 32bit OS? im not looking for major upgrades at this point.

o and any ideas on how to get my ram at 1066 would be great.. i might just leave it at 800mhz and tighten timings a bit, should that give me roughly the same performance?

Quote:
i forgot very high = DX10... lol. i know the 32bit sux cause i cant run 4gb, but i just bought a new car and i dont have the money for windows 7 right now.. i will be able to get it thru my school for $30 pretty soon, so i will do that and get 64bit. i realy like XP, its never failed me, but i will get windows 7 asap.

ill adjust my ram timings now, thanks a lot.

1) There's nothing wrong with gaming on XP. I've been doing it for 7+ years, and still do when I'm not playing the few DX10 games I own. XP 32-bit does NOT 'suck for gaming', like, at all. Even 2GB on XP 32-bit is enough for 99% of the games out there. Crysis may not be one of them though. Whether or not you should get 1 more stick or two kinda depends on what you see as being your next upgrade. I'd get two more 1GB sticks if I were you, and not worry about whether or not XP 'sees' all 4GB or not. It really doesn't matter, because 3GB is plenty enough ram for ANY game on XP. And if you have 4gb, then you're all ready for an upgrade to 64-bit Windows 7. Plus you make sure you stay in dual-channel mode that way.

2) It's not surprising Crysis would slow down over time running it on only 2GB. It 'should not' crash just because you've exceeded your 2GB, but it's logical it might slow down and get choppy as the page file gets used more and more. Note that there's a huge difference between 'should not' and 'would not' when it comes to computers. Also, the slowdowns could also have been due to where you were in the game. The earlier parts are much easier to run than the later parts (the ice and aliens put a big load on the gfx card).

3) PC games crash. Sometimes it just happens. I don't worry about it unless it keeps happening and there's no remotely logical reason for it.

4) The XP BSOD error message is very generic ... do not read anything into what it says. The only thing in that message that is remotely useful info is the name of the driver that crashed.

5) A 32-bit OS run on a board that supports Physical Address Extensions (with PAE enabled in the bios) will often appear to have 4GB available. This is the maximum amount of ram that a 32-bit OS can support. Theoretically some of this 4GB will be mapped to the video card memory addresses, thus reducing the 'available' ram for the system, but this may or may not show up as 'subtracted' from the 4GB, depending on where you look for it.

6) It would be logical to try reducing the overclock on the video card and seeing if the issue goes away. Crysis is a probably the ultimate 'stability tester' out there, and XP can for sure BSOD if your OC is a little too high ... which you might *only see* on Crysis because it's so demanding.

7) I am POSITIVE there's a way to get your memory to run at 1066 even if your FSB is at 800MHz with that board. There is a memory multiplier (aka strap) somewhere in your bios, you just have to find it and change it. This being said, due to the inherent latency introduced by simply having your memory controller in the northbridge (and a few other reasons), there's really VERY little (or no) performance difference between running your memory at 800MHz as opposed to 1066MHz on a 775 socket rig.

8) Mainly the reason that 1066 speed memory is nice to have is that it gives you more overclocking headroom when the memory is running 1-to-1 with your processor. You don't have to worry about cranking up the FSB to like 450MHz in order to overclock your cpu. When you do this, your memory ends up at 900MHz, which may be overclocked too far if you have 800MHz rated memory (bearing in mind that 1:1 is the lowest multiplier on 775 boards). This in turn would limit your cpu overclock ... which of course we do not want to see

Quote:
+7 years, It's time to move on.

It's very probable that you ran out of ram, and i was getting BSOD's all the time with XP, heck, at stock clocks i had a hard time booting,
Convert: run memtest and fill up all your ram and see what happens

At this point I would bet that too high of a GPU OC is the issue here.

Quote:

Quote:
Nothing here is of use for diagnosing the OP's stability issues, and much of it is blatant misinformation.

XP and XP x64 are perfectly competent at gaming (and most other tasks), as long as DX10+ is not crucial. As a 9800GT is not really sufficent for DX10 Crysis, moving to Vista/7 will do nothing for his ability to play the game.

Quote:
QFT.

720MHz on a 88/9800GT core is pretty high is the truth. Some chips will do it, and many will not. The first thing I'd try is stock gpu clocks just to see if the issue goes away. Then you at least have a starting point ...

Quote:
BSOD's can ABSOLUTELY happen because of too high an overclock, either on the CPU or the GPU. I've personally seen it MANY MANY MANY times. Although crashing/freezing can certainly also happen

Quote:
The horse-puckey continues to pile up on this thread. CPU-bottlenecks don't cause your system to crash. Yes, a pentium is not optimal for gaming (crysis especially), but it shouldn't cause the system to crash.