yea same exact thing with the Omega drivers. This is really frustrating hehe. It makes the game just annoying enough not to play, but I really wanted to get back into it. Furthermore, I feel I should mention this: I HAVE been having some stability issues regarding D3D apps. In games like MVP Baseball 2005, Winning Eleven 9, and now I just had it happen in FFXI, randomly my computer will do sort of a soft shut down, I've never seen anything like it. My monitor clicks off but my box is still running, but sound cuts out, obviously the screen is black.. it's like it tries to restart but doesn't, so I have to restart it. It happens like once a week only during direct3D rendering. Is it time I reformatted? Or is my vid card getting burnt out.

yumm.. Hardware damage..

Nearly all systems ive seen having this behavior have had a piece of bad hardware in them. Could be a bad stick of memory, damage in the CPU or GPU, or even a problem with the board. Nailing this down is gonna be a little tougher.

Google and download Prime95 to test your processor and MemTest to test your memory. Also a good old visual inspection of the board might turn something up. I have seen bad capaciters cause just this behavior as well. Go to Badcaps.com to get an idea what to look for.

Unfortunately testing your gfx card wont be so easy. Your best bet is to swap it out for another card and see if you can reproduce the instability. Can be tough since modern cards can be very expensive. Theres a switch somewhere in your registry to disable the built in windows behavior to turn off the machine instead of show a Blue Screen Of Death. Ill dig around and see if i can find it..

Maybe one of the cooling fans
on your graphics card or cpu or
even in the power supply is not working.

If a fan has failed, the damage is done. Heat does indeed kill electronics But a fan will usually make an unmistakable sound when it gets caught in something or runs dry and starts to sieze up. When your snooping around in the case, power up the machine and check that all the fans are spinnin and listen for grinding bearing noises. Wouldnt hurt to sniff for the smell of burnt electronics (may be faint esp if its still half workin).

Well, again, I am pretty computer savvy and I keep up with this sort of thing. The only thing I can think of is that I've had a sneaking suspicion lately that my vid card has been starting to go bad. I can certainly believe that is the fault. I suppose I could swap out to my old 9600 XT but man...the x800 gto is leagues above that card hehe. I purchased the x800 less than a year ago and I am only maybe hoping that this is a software error..
Otherwise, I've been thinking about updating my mobo, processor, vid card and RAM...kinda like building a new person with just the organs. I have a good PSU (Enermax 460W), a good burner, a good box, a lot of fans, two good Hard drives (altho they are ATA)...any suggestions on that? I'm a college student and, of course, have less than a grand to my name, my car needs, work, etc, but I am wondering if it'd be a novel idea to just get like an AMD san diego for like $90, a new vid card, a new mobo and a good set of RAM (My RAM is value ram, yay). Let me know what you think since you guys have been so helpful. Thanks btw =D

Oh also, as for the fans, I've played with all that and the fans in my system are all working fine. None of em are jammed up (I use fan control on ATI tray tool and you can certainly hear GPU fan speeding up) and I've checked the other umm..5 in my box and they're good =D

Well well well... I ran MemTest and it found 1 error. Now how do I figure out which stick it is on? My RAM is sorta oddly set up.. I have 512 megs in a 2x256 samsung nice ram, and then I bought this stupid value stick of 1 gig RAM, I am obviously gonna assume it's that one. Should I juts disconnect that 1 gig stick to see what I get out of my RAM? I am tempted to just buy another 1 gig of good ram in dual channel. Also..with RAM, the dual channel is obviously the way to go right? I have the samsung 2x256 on Dual channel but the other ram is just floating out there. I bought it back when I didn't understand RAM that much. Would I be smart to just spend like $100 on 2x512 sticks of some nice patriot ram or something if this turns out to be the problem? I haven't changed any of my RAM timings in BIOS or anything to create this problem.

edit: Ok so I took out the 1G stick of RAM and reran MemTest and sure enough, no errors. The only problem is I have an MSI K7N2 Delta mainboard that only has 3 slots for RAM. I have 512 in the dual channel slot and I bought that extra one essentially to triple my RAM, but it can't be dual channeled and it would appear that my extra stick has errors. Boo =( gonna run a test on juts that one piece of RAM isolated without the other 2.

edit: well here we are again, I tested each ram set seperately and found no errors...So my problem might be in the BIOS. Any suggestions of a good BIOS to run? I don't think mine is incredibly up to date or even that good haha.

This message was edited by ccolgan on Sep 20 2006.

This message was edited by ccolgan on Sep 20 2006.

Try this site

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/download/dld/spt_dld_detail.php?UID=436&kind=1

heh yea I coulda found those BIOS. I dunno if I want to get MSI bios tho, I'm sure there are better BIOS setups out there. I retested all the memory and it worked out perfectly clean after I put it all back together, MemTest worked clean for an hour. Prime95 worked perfectly fine, it ran all through the self-test and no issues.

I am pretty stumped on this, the Omega drivers made no diff but hopefully they fixed the crashing. I'll check back in after tonight, see if I can induce a crash =D

I just want to say again that I really appreciate everyone's help so far, and thanks.

So again, Alicia and John, I checked the mobo and the caps, they are not at all bad. They are actually in great shape; not a single one bent or bulging, etc. I feel like reinstalling my old 9600 XT would not give me a very sensible comparison of vid cards because it really is nowhere near the performance level of my x800 and I am reluctant to think I could see what kind of stability issues would be resolved playing Oblivion, being that I really could barely play oblivion with the 9600xt in the first place. Otherwise I might just need to save some money and buy some new components..again =D

That memory error has me worried.. Are the sticks all the same speed? Sometimes the memory controller will get confused when attempting to run multiple sets of varying speed memory. They try and design flexability into them but running like this is a difficult task. Try running the machine without the value ram and see if you can get a crash. Itll be slow but suffering is part of troubleshooting

My rule generally is that if a machine returns a memory error at any point, somethings gotta be changed. One error doesnt sound like much but since errors tend to build on eachother, its more than enough to create instability.

Ive had alot of bad experiances with updating/changing bios versions. The memory controller is a solid state chip and cant be modified (unless you know how to solder/desolder surface mount devices :^) so flashing the bios will likely have no effect. You might just end up with more problems than you had before (as was the case in about 75% of the bios flashes ive done). If you still wanna try it go to Driverguide.com and search for your mobo model. They keep nearly every bios version for every board ive ever looked for there.

Ahh dont thank me. Ive had more than my share of bad hardware and nothings worse than worring if your otherwise awsome rig is gonna crash and burn at any moment. My last rig suffered from bad caps.. 13 of them popped on the board and since it was a Socket-478/AGP, getting ahold of a decient replacement was next to impossable. That was a bummer...

This message was edited by Alicia n John on Sep 21 2006.

Yea that's about where I'm at now. About 6 months ago I decided to upgrade my vid card to play Oblivion, but I'm still on AGP so now if I want to do anything else in updating, I really have to go to PCI-E. My memories DO have different timings, and I am pretty sure that is why I came back with an error. I tested the value RAM and the 2x256 sticks individually for a long time and got no errors..then reset them to SPD and they worked fine. I've really tried just about everything I can think of and I am still getting those absurdly long pauses in gameplay during Oblivion. I haven't experienced the crashes again yet. The Omega drivers make playing Counter-Strike a rediculous amount better tho =D Apparently they really optimized openGL, my CS game runs 10x smoother, it was actually difficult to play cuz I was so used to the mouse not being so responsive.

I feel like what I've proved is that my video card is probably a little burned out, and it might be time to update my system. Like I said, I might look into buying a new mobo, vid card, RAM, and processor and just installing those into my system.

Yeah AGP really doesnt stand up to PCI-E anymore. AGP makes for a nasty bottleneck in a system. They make 2 versions of the ATI X850XL, one for AGP and one for PCI-E. The benchmarks are far better for the PCI-E version even tho the chipset and memory is identical.

Since were still a ways away from saturating the bus on a PCI-E port, upgrading now should give you plenty of room for further upgrades as the machine ages.

Upgrades good!

yea upgrades good, prices bad =/ I feel like going with the x1... series would be better for the vid card tho wouldn't it? the old r480 cores on those x850's aren't the new technology, the x1 series are obviously the new stuff. Isn't going to a x850 not a huge upgrade from my x800? I am tryin to price stuff on newegg.com and it's gonna be a 600+ affair if I really plan on doing well with my ugprades =/ Alicia and John would you care to AIM me some time so we can actually discuss this without messaging back and forth? =D You seem to be quite helpful so I figure you're a good resource to ask.
my AIM is CoreyMaxVT I am usually on (EST) in the later morning/early afternoon and past 10 PM EST. Thanks =D

I recommend the x850 because its what i use!
seriously tho, the PCI-E version is a totally differant animal. Dont pay too much attention to the numbers on these things. sure an 800 is better than an 850, but an x1600 is nowhere near twice an x800. Marketing schemeing..

The PCI-E x850 is relitavely cheap and it didnt sound like you wanted to spend too much outright. If you have the destire to fork out the cash by all means go for it! I actually bought an X1900 but the damned thing showed up DOA.. I was so pissed off that i just returned it and got a lesser cheaper card. Im sure you noticed the lower end card in an otherwise top of the line machine (as of erlier this year hehhe).Newegg charged me 40 bucks for the restocking fee (what.. theyre gonna restock a dead card?) and i wasnt about to risk trashing another 40 bucks if the next one was dead.. newegg jerks...

Anyway with a powerfull system backing it up, you dont necessarily need an uber powerfull card. I have had no complains with how mine works at all.

I run servers for several games and have shyed away from installing AIM for fear of higher latency to my machine.. I dont mind posting here and i think the oblivion forum needs the posts per day count.

not sure if you got a solution to this problem but I had a similar problem try the first option in this post

http://www.neoseeker.com/forums/index.php?fn=view_thread&t=755731

Oblivion: Game pauses when enemy's apear

Hope it helps if you are still having issues