Sounds like it's running your video card harder than anything else. Stuff to try (although I'm sure you've covered most if not all of it already):
- latest nForce drivers installed
- latest GeForce drivers installed
- latest non-pirated version of HL2
- don't overclock your video card or CPU (maybe even try underclocking video card)
- monitor temps while running HL2 (if you have multiple monitors, an LCD display, or a logger) to make sure none of your stuff is overheating during the game

I'm able to run HL2 quite well, but my system is very different from yours. It seems obvious from what I've read that the Source engine is way too touchy about system configurations, as it seems to put a lot more stress on the hardware than other new games.

How does Doom3 run on that system?

While Half-Life 2 (mostly Counter-Strike Source) runs like crap on my setup, it doesn't hang at all. I can keep playing for hours.

I have an AMD Sempron 3000+ on an nForce2 board (Abit NF7) with an ATi Radeon 9600

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ nForce2 (GigaByte GA7N400Pro2) with ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB. Not much higher but runs pretty good. el_, how much RAM you got?

Never heard of NVMonitor before...of course I haven't had a Geforce in my rig since early 2003. Mabye try another monitoring program like RivaTuner or something?

You also might be better off asking around in the Steam forums, I really can't help with HL2 issues since "I FSCKING HATE ACTIVATION!" heh. 😁

HunterZ wrote:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ nForce2 (GigaByte GA7N400Pro2) with ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB. Not much higher but runs pretty good. el_, how much RAM you got?

1GB, but running at slower 266Mhz CAS2.5

1GB 400MHz CAS 2.0 dual-channel, although it's Infineon so I can't brag too much...

I have just changed the default Windows dynamic swapfile for a 3GB static one and I have noticed some improvement. Yet, HL2 engine sucks in my humble opinion. It's very eye-candy but not a good performer.

Forgot to mention I have a 4GB contiguous, static swapfile on a striped SATA RAID array. Defragmenting your hard drives and swapfiles will help, as the game is huge.

HunterZ:

- check
- check
- check
- check (except for the underclocking part)
- check

NVMonitor comes with nTune (which I am not using; only kept it around because NVMonitor had been useful -- up until my video card temp disappeared from it). The card was never running over 80C -- well within the 140C threshhold for the chip. No components in my system are overclocked. (caveat: This is a lie, ASUS 'helpfully' automatically overclocks everything by 1% in order to make their boards appear slightly faster, but this small overclock should never cause stability issues.) The memory is rated for CAS 2 and is in dual-channel mode (though, the timings were higher than I thought they should have been the last time I looked in memtest since it's CAS 2 RAM -- they are set to be controlled with SPD). I tried upping my swapfile to static 2GB the last time I tried playing and this did not help.

I haven't tried Doom 3. I'll give it a shot sometime, but I hated that fucking game. Far Cry stresses pretty much exactly the same way but doesn't suck as much. 😜

Fast Writes?

How's the 6800 get power? Through a connector on the video card? Might want to try a different cable and or make sure nothing else is sharing.

Might also want to use performance monitor and watch CPU/memory usage. Mabye you can find some common symptom that could explain the lockups. Mabye HL2 stresses the memory more than any other program?

Yeah, FarCry is much better gameplay experience than Doom 3. Wonder how much better the new FarCry will be. Too bad it's only for XBox. 🙁

Saw this thread at ARS: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forum … /m/112005365731

Looks like they recommend disabling HDR. I remember hearing other people having problems with it too so that's probably what it is.

Intriguing. But HDR makes things look much more lifelike. 😒 I really wish I knew how they managed to fuck that up, since S&I for Half-Life 1 has a fairly decent HDR implementation that doesn't break shit. (Of course, it uses OpenGL. Hmmmmmmm...)

P.S. The video card gets all of its power through the mainboard; it uses DDR ram instead of GDDR3 RAM so it doesn't require the extra power connection.

Though... how long has HDR existed in the Source code? These locks have been occurring for months.

Addendum: I've just spent about an hour reading through posts in the Steam forums. Source should have never been released -- I have NEVER seen so many problems with a single piece of code in history (save perhaps Windows 9x, but guess which one is more complex)! The most promising thing I read was to force the game to use DirectX 8.1 (fuck), force framerate to 60fps (fuck again) and turn on vsync (that part's ok), and then it will only stutter instead of hardlock. Fucking great. Valve, what a worthless piece of shit company.