I'm scared of playing a game...

  • Thread starter Sureboss
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Sureboss

Sureboss

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I downloaded an Age of Empires 3 demo at the end of last week, playing it, happily for about 30 minutes, was as smooth as anything, then suddenly the screen screwed up, then upon restarting the monitor just sat saying, "no signal found". My brother got it to re-start in the morning, he touched nothing. It's been fine since then, including 5-6 hours of Football Manager. I think FM is more resource hungry because it uses more power, so I think if that were a problem, it would have crashed again, since then.

But am I worrying over nothing? Did the gfx card just overheat? I'm confused, it's been as happy as anything ever since.
 
I'm guessing you dl'd the demo from ageofempires3.com so it stands to reason that it is a clean version and not spiked with malware and the like, but it couldn't hurt to run Ad-Aware of Spybot anyway.

Seeing as how the game is over three years old (therefore the requirements are quite low) and you've just upgraded your PC (I can't remember exactly what you did and I'm just too plain lazy to look), I highly doubt that you've maxed out your rig.

Fluke, perhaps?
 
I hate to go off topic but, is AOE3 anything like the previous game. I really like the first ones where you can customize the map, and go through all of ages (except modern age of-course) and build your empire how you like. AOE3 looks alot different according to the reviews I read. Again sorry for going off topic.
 
Sounds like the graphics card overheating, but I haven't a clue why it would overheat on Age of Empires.
 
TB
I'm guessing you dl'd the demo from ageofempires3.com so it stands to reason that it is a clean version and not spiked with malware and the like, but it couldn't hurt to run Ad-Aware of Spybot anyway.

Seeing as how the game is over three years old (therefore the requirements are quite low) and you've just upgraded your PC (I can't remember exactly what you did and I'm just too plain lazy to look), I highly doubt that you've maxed out your rig.

Fluke, perhaps?
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Now on a 2Ghz Asus (can't remember exact board), which is overclocked at ~2.2Ghz (was like this when I got it and has been like it for a while) and 1GB RAM. The card is a Radeon X1650 Pro.

I know you can get overclocking temp programmes online, can you get it for GFX cards? Is it in the BIOS?

Shall I check inside to make sure I haven't got a PATA cable over the fan? Again, I know FM09 is more hungry for graphics than AOE3 (using the FM 3D engine) so I'm presuming it's a one off. GFX cards will have a temp at which they automatically shut down upon reaching, don't they?
 
nick09
From what I know all graphics cards have a shutdown setting for overheating.
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Not all. One of my old computers had a graphics-related overheating issue and the screen got darker with less contrast. It didn't shut down on it's own.
 
There are many ways that an overheating video card can manifest symptoms. Shutdown is just one of the options. You can also see polygon drops, texture map corruption, texture warping (when a transform results in one of the vertices of a triangle going off in Timbuktu, so you have a line that goes from somewhere offscreen to the middle of the rendered scene).

Also, newer systems are not immune to overheating when driven hard, especially if there is a cooling failure somewhere (stuck fan, or loose heatsink). There should be temperature monitoring software available for your card.
 
I'll have a scowl through the stuff that came with the box. I'd say the texture map corruption definitely happened.
 
You'll be better off looking on the web for more up to date tools, specifically ATI's website.
 

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