I've just got a new pc and everything runs smooth until I start up UT and after a random period of time it just blacks out and the only thing I can do is press restart. Here come the specs...

ASUS A7N266-VM Motherboard
Athlon XP 2200 with heatsink and fan
256MB DDR ram
64MB Gforce Ti4200
60 gig 7200rpm HD and cooler
52x cdrom
Windows XP Pro
An old iiyama monitor

As far as i can tell i've got all the latest drivers and updates.

Please help!:confused:

I'm not the best on pc's so i apologise if it is something really simple.

as i was just talking to about. you should turn off the onboard grafics chip and sound card in bios and then try running with ur agp graf card. also check that vga is set to boot from agp. have a look at the agp settings aswell and put it on 4x and the apeture size to either 32 or 64, dont go over or it'll use too much system memory. hope this helps.

ps really u want to be running only onboard **** or only plug in ****. dont knowe why but you might get conflicts with running onboard sound to agp graf card.

pps. just remembered a problem my m8 had with soundblaster and gf2. his display setting were set to maxium hard acceleration, its a preety pap setting in display config but he turned it down to medium hardware acc and it seemed to work.

ok found this it basicly boils down 2 a softwar prob some ware have a read an research this forum as well wat driver u usein ? the 42.01? an wat via driver u on ???


http://www.guru3d.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=44103

Thanks for the help guys. I've disabled the onboard sound and graphics and I can now play UT but with no sound. So what do I have to do now? Get a new soundcard?

It's all good now. Thanks again.

i think your gonna have to get a pci sound card dude. as i said you can run the onboard stuff but only the onboard stuff because its all intergrated in the mobo. but if youve got a nice graf card like the one you got then your gonna wanna use it bro. get a new pci sound card with 5.1 digital surround. you can pick them up dirt cheap at the mo. £30 will get you a decent one which supports hardware 3d. may make the game run faster aswell....

good luck dude, new comps are a ***** to get up and runnning with no conflicts! ;)

I had exactly the same prob with Peachys machine a little while a go....
I boiled it down to: XP + ATI Card + UT2003 = Random Black Screens.

I tried loadsa tings... all failed. So i went back to 98SE on her machine & all is good.
Mrp ;)

Well, after all this time and trying everything you all said and more I am happy to anounce that my blackout problem is over (hooray!). It seems that the problem was with something called a RX 55 memory register in via chipsets.

Quote:
"The RX55 register's official name and function is Memory Write Queue (MWQ) timer. The MWQ timer is actually a timing device included in the memory host controller to prevent write data being held in the memory queue too long. After the data has been in the queue too long it times out. This timed out data is then given a higher write request priority. Now that might sound nice – a bit of extra performance BUT the procedure fails when overloaded. 3D games and Win XP put too much load on the memory queuing timer procedure. The nVidia new driver exaggerates the problem even more as the driver enables nVidia cards to use even more memory than previous driver versions."

I downloaded a beta patch to close the memory register altogether and now I can play UT blackout free!
:D

Just thought I'd put this up incase anyone else gets the same annoying problem in the future.

P.S. Knowing my luck after writing this It'll happen again ;)

Thanx Shuey, this is valuable info...
We have plenty of people on XP, so if you would, please post the link to the patch you downloaded and we'll make it sticky :)

Well there's a lot of info on VIA problems here:http://pcbuyersguide.com/hardware/motherboards/VIA-Problems.html
You can get the patch by clicking on 'beta patch' in the Graphics glitches paragraph. Thats where I got it from.

P.S. Knowing my luck after writing this It'll happen again

AAAAARRRRRGHHHHHH!!!! I was right!

Its still happening.

i still think its a conflict wid ya sound and graf. your mobo specialises in onboard sound and video. and i think if you run seperates aswell you may run into probs. heres the mobo (http://www.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=a7n266-vm) i need to get the manual for ur mobo and giv u the settings. the saga continues

[edit] finally managed to dload the manual for ur mobo cos the asus server is bk up. i'll read it adn let know.

I'm not convinced its a VIA/XP problem. I tend to think it's a conflict of some sort with either your integrated controllers (sound, graphics, or lan) or it's a vid card driver issue. If you are using the newest video driver then try an older one.