TobyG

false call....just delayed it haha.

i managed to stop games crashing by disabling my second monitor when playing games and not running the app ultramon whilst playing aswell. So far ive been playing for a good while with no crashes and games on top speccy.

yes i bought a brand new HDD : Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII *32MB Cache* And i have the graphics card fitted in the blue expansion slot on the motherboard?

yea i do have the latest drivers and my pc doesnt over heat, the sim3 is a major problem with this, i cant play it more than 10mins without it freezing up my entire computer.

That link was too the U.S driver updates, you saying to install them on my pc inplace of the UK version? and yes ive since learnt my friends lied to me when they told me to always go with Nvidia

Ok guys, i think i need some help as this is driving me nuts. I custom built my pc a few weeks ago so that i would be able to play some of the latest games.....so far i was wrong and they run....till they either just quit out randomly or freeze up my computer entirely. The spec of the new pc is: Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P (Socket AM3) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard CPU: AMD Phenom II X3 Tri Core 720 Black Edition 2.8GHz (Socket AM3) Memory: Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 10666C9 1333MHz TwinX Dual Channel (TW3X4G1333C9) Graphics card : XFX GeForce GTX 260 "Core 216 55nm" 896MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) PSU: OCZ StealthXStream 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply Ive updated all drivers, all os updates and such, ive just totally run out of ideas. The kind of games it just quits out of are anno 1701, The Sims3 (lucky if i get 10mins), farcry2. Ive directx diagnostics on the pc, it came up telling me everything was running as it should. Also after the computer froze once after a restart it said about a serious error so u submitted this error to ms and i was taken to a webpage which told me this : (dont know if it'll help?) "Follow these steps to solve the problem with a video device driver You received this message because a device driver installed on your computer caused Windows to stop unexpectedly. This type of error is referred to as a "stop error." A stop error requires you to restart your computer." So please, if you have any idea's i would greatly appreciate it Toby p.s Thanks in advance

not sure if this means anything, but i put my headphones on today and started to play a game and in the background of the game sounds i could here a noise, so i muted the game sames and the headphones were making a similar sound to that of the actual pc? when i minimized the game, the headphone sounds stopped as do the ones on the pc?

im 95% sure that the clicking sounds when some games are loading comes from the graphics card aswell as the going nuts sounds when some of the games are running. Also i do have the bios set to the correct setting as stated above. Im starting to think these are the standard noises of the graphics cards, but still doesnt explain the jumping in some games. :(

i bought a brand new 1tb hdd, 7200rpm and had a 32mb cache, all i can remember off the top of my head

no other games can become a little sluggish also, even world of warcraft, i have Settlers6 here but i havnt played that much yet, that game hasnt gone slow on me yet but it makes my pc make one hell of a noise when trying to play it.

You mean for my Graphics card? Im running 185.85. Also got service pack 3 for my windows xp 32-bit. DirectX version 9.0c also. When i updated all drivers i could for Vista i thought the only thing that could be left to keep the games running slow was the os, hence i switched back to xp but its still struggling with anno

ahhhh as long as that isnt the main reason my games are running slow.....thats the one part i really want to try and work out haha. Anno...simple and fun game to play.....but not when your screens jumping about the island

That bad? This is my first system build and my friends told me it was a good idea?

Yes thats what i have with the Nvidia GTX260 Graphics card and a 600w Powersupply.

My pc doesnt completely shut down just the games shut down, which is why i dont think its an overheating problem and i have the latest drivers direct from the nvidia site. What ive done is uninstall vista and hoping that running everything back on xp will solve the problem. Even though my game anno 1701 still struggles a bit a times on my computer (i didnt expect it to with what im now running)