Freezing While Playing

Hello,

I've started playing Guild Wars just a few days ago and from very beginning I have a serious problem... I hope that I will find someone who will be able to help me out.

When I'm playing the game it just suddenly freezes (it can happen after 20 minutes, after 2 hours or even after about 5 minutes) and then the only solution is the "Restart" button on computer's case. Do you image such situation: I'm doing a long and quite hard quest with a nice party and just suddenly - "BAM", it freezes. This thing kills me.

My PC's specs:
- AMD Sempron [email protected]+ (2 GHz) on ABIT NF7-S V2.0 (Socket A);
- 512 MB DDR400;
- Leadtek A6600 (GeForce 6600 GPU) TD - ForceWare 81.95*.

With these I have no performance issues at max. settings (only the resolution is at 1024x768), so I don't think that the problem is somewhere there.

I was thinking of maybe something is overheating, but I haven't had ANY problems with other games, like F.E.A.R., which has way more complicated graphics than Guild Wars. And when some component overheats, the computer should restart, not freeze. So I think that the problem is not there, as well.

* I was thinking of downgrading ForceWare to Release 70 or even 60. Maybe the problem is somewhere there. I'll try.

I will be very grateful if someone will help me solve this problem, THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!

Adding another 256 of RAM wouldn't hurt.

OK, I've done some researching.

Overheating is not the problem for sure. I was running NvTempLogger (GPU temperature logging tool) while playing GW and after the freeze I've checked .log: temperature didn't cross 70C line (and deadline is 145C).

Also I've found that it's possible that Anti-Virus software may cause freezes, I've turned off mine, but it still happened.

I still need to try the following:
- Downgrading Video Card drivers;
- Trying some alternative LAN Card drivers;
- Cleaning dust inside the case.

And you'll pay for that extra RAM, right?

The RAM aint the cause, although the more the better, that's not what your problem is...??

One point in your post I am confused at is, your Semperon is it a 2400 overclocked at a 2800 or is it clocked to 2.8. Revert your cpu back to stock and see if that makes a difference.


EDIT - Who is your ISP, sometimes you can have automatic time outs, although your online your ISP thinks otherwise and you lose connecton. It's worth a look into.. Are you using a router(wireless or otherwise??.

I'll try that.

Well, first of all, how should the game react when internet connection goes down? If it should freeze, then maybe it's the problem, because lately my ISP is acting weird. I'm on 512 Kbps line.

I'd say that 70C is extremely hot. My CPU typical hovers around 45C under full load, which is quite high - the CPU you have is quoted to be able to operate up to 80-90C, but you normally want your CPU to be under 50C at all times.

Basically I think you've got a temperature problem.

That FEAR doesn't lock up doesn't really say anything - it's not your graphics card that's overheating, it's your CPU, and althoug FEAR is more graphics-intensive, GW might actually be crunching more data and/or moving more data around in RAM than FEAR does.

EDIT: The easy way to check if it's the CPU overheating, is to run at default speed (if you're overclocking) or underclock (if you're running at default speed) and see if the lockups disappear. Another possibility is to try to run a stress test, like Prime95 (with or without the Stress Prime 2004 GUI). If the computer doesn't lock up after a couple of hours of Prime95, well, then the CPU is unlikely to be the problem.

Hi there, I think I can help.

If by freeze you mean all graphics lock up, and the sound loops causeing a sort of 'stutter', then this is a very common problem with the 6800 series and it might be the same on the 6600's.
Firstly if this is the problem, i always found that after 20-30 seconds it continued again, although for the first few months I didnt realise and always did a hard reset.

Anyway, here are a few things to try!

1. If you are using an nforce3 motherboard there is an incompatability with one of the driver componants. If you go to add/remove programes -> nvidia drivers -> change you can uninstall specific drivers. I cant remember which one it is but in mine I still have:
Display driver,
ethernet driver,
IDE driver,
and PCI driver.
Try removing any others that are in there.

2. A simple fix that normally works is to disable fast writes on the card, you should be able to do this in bios or with a number of nvidia tweeking programs, I used rivatuner to do this on mine.

3. Downgrading to the 6x drivers helps in some cases, although I have also had luck with the most recent drivers i installed earlier this week so maybe they fixed something they broke in the 7x drivers?

Anyway, hope this helps!

edit: Although numa is right that 70c on a CPU would be horrible, 70c on a 6xxx card its fine, mine only starts to go funcky on me if it hits 90+ so 70 should be ok

First of all, NvTempLogger is logging GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) temperature, not CPU My CPU temp is around 50C Burn and 40C Idle.

Thanks, very helpful post, I'll see what I can do.

It sounds like your temps are fine. I find that people on this forum tend to suggest that overheating is the cause of problems far more often than it is.

Also:
UPGRADING IS NEVER THE SOLUTION TO ACTUAL PROBLEMS! Having low system specs is not going to cause lockups or overheating or damage to your system as some suggest. Low system specs cause things to run slow and look less pretty and that's all. You may have indirect issues with old hardware like problems with old drivers, etc., but adding more RAM is never the solution to lockup problems, etc. Now, you could have a bad RAM module, but the amount of RAM is not going to cause your PC to hard-lock. Ever.

I would suggest trying what Plutonic suggested and go from there. Good luck!

23:10 (GMT+02)

The first thing I've done, was checking how the game reacts to connection disappearance (I've uplugged the cable from my LAN Card). Like I thought - the game prompts NetErr=7 and gets back to login screen. No freeze.

Now to the serious part:

I've set FSB clock back to 166 MHz (Multiplier is 10.0) and CPU frequency is now 1667 MHz. The only thing I've altered from default settings is FSB/RAM ratio, which is now 5/6 to make 400 MHz RAM frequency (by default it's 6/6 and in such way RAM frequency is only 333 MHz, and why should I leave that, while my RAM is made to run at 400 MHz?).
I didn't test the game after these changes yet, I'll test it today or tomorrow. If the game freezes, I'll try to go back to complete factory settings (yes, even 5/6 FSB/RAM ratio).

hey i had the same crash problem, right down to the last iritating detail!!! it sucks, nealy finishes a coperative with bonus and... oh its frozen! this is how i solved it... i took the case off. its an overheat problem! i can play as freely as i like now, although im scaired of spillin drinks on it :-s think of investing in a drill to make some holes and a cupple of fans like im goana

while GPU overheating can make a PC freeze he has already said it is running at 70 degrees which is about right, I once had an over heat problem because the heatsink was coming loose, tightening it fixed the problem, but it was running at about 90 degrees before it became an issue and it was not even a hard lock then, just big stutters every so often.

Heh, I was able to play the game without any freezes for three hours, so I guess overclocking CPU was the problem. I'm still not 100% sure, but we'll see...
If this happens again, I'll post in this thread.

And for now, thanks for everyone, who have helped me so far.