I might suggest some empirical testing.
Take your video card to a friend's house and hook it into their machine. Test BF2 for a while. If it BSOD it is probably the video card.

Then take your friend's video card and put it in your machine and test for a while. If it BSOD's it's probably something on your motherboard or not enough cooling.

Is that PSU youve got a Q-Tec one or unbraded? If so, im sure that PSU is not up to the task. I have run into similar problems in the past (BSoD) and its because cheapo PSU. I would recommend if you havent got one a Tagan, Enermax, Hiper or Antec PSU, those are quality and can supply enough amps to your card.

One thing you can do its check on the label of the PSU how many amps does the PSU do? If its under 28A I would really consider to get a new one.

Cheers
Gabriel

I hope you read this, because it has a little to do with silicon stupidity and programmer neglegence...

Back in the day, when CS was beta:
I bought a Soundblaster Live 5.1 card and had a heck of a time with the drivers. Creative caused the original problem by giving the wrong information to the BIOS manufacturers. BSOD - Squeal of Death - Smoke from computer and ears. Patch Patch Patch. The BSOD had nothing to do with the BIOS problem, it turns out that Creative Labs allowed the sound card driver to have an interupt level higher than the core system task. This is very bad and Micro$oft will have none of it.

About 4 BIOS updates, 5 Driver updates, 2 live patches to the PCI bus using WPCRedit - I still had problems. Most said Creative was the problem, others said that it was the motherboard ASUS A7V133 MB with AMD NB and VIA SB, some blamed AMD while other blamed poor poor Mr. Gates.

The problem got somewhat better - instead of a BSOD, I started to get the infinite sound loop. Every patch from M$, CL and ASUS BIOS update made it a little better.

Next computer ABIT KG7-RAID same NB and SB. Same problem with the infinite sound loop. So I bought an Audigy. I went a week without a problem, then it came back.

Next computer ABIT NF7-S NForce2 Ultra using the Soundstorm audio on the motherboard - guess what, same stupid problem.

I was at a local LAN party and won a Plantronics USB DSP-500 headset (CounterStrike branded). I started using this, because it was so damn cool and it worked like a dream. It was about a month later that I noticed that my system had not crashed. WOW I thought is was fixed - nope. Now I only get the crash about once a month, but I can CTRL-ALT-DEL and kill CS without having to reboot.

A suspicion has been growing because I observed this twice: I had the head phones off and heard my hard drive spin up and the loop until the hard drive went active. Twice I've seen this and it was the same exact stuttering loop. I also noticed that I get the loop when a one of these two conditions is going on:
I am next to a heavy textured wall reloading and I spin to look around.
OR
I am naded and I spin to shoot.

In both cases, that sound (reload or nade splode) is the infinite loop.

I know this is not 100% on your topic, it's just a similar nightmare.

I am in the works of building a new system:
Koolance EXOS 2 - CPU/VIDEO
...the stupid NForce3 chip is under the video card, no WC here...
Antec Super Lanboy case
Antec 550W True Control II
MSI NEO 2 Platinum Ultra
AMD 64 3500 Winchester core
Mushkin 1G PC3200 Level II Ultra 2-2-2-1 matched
BFG 6800 Ultra OC 256MB
(4) Hitachi 160G SATA drives prob in RAID 0+1

Have not powered it up yet for lack of time. Soon, very soon.

I wonder if I will have the same problem you are having or if this will have the same problem with the onboard sound or the USB DSP-500.

I can't say enough good things about this headset.

Oh, I bought my son an ATI 9800 Pro 128MB card and have had NOTHING but problems with the drivers from ATI @_#*@#*$@#*$@. Thank GOD for Omega Red. Three cheeres for this guy. ATI may have made "some" of the best hardware in the video card biz, but they can't program their way out of a paper bag. If parachutes used ATI drivers...

Mark Farrell - [cLeRkS]TheDoctor

This comment was edited on Jul 18, 03:10.

Since i had (or was very strongly encuraged) to install the 73. something drivers for Battlefield2, i also had problems with games running at 1600*1200 on my Nvidia card.

With those drivers i am sometimes getting a BSoD after playing Guild Wards on 1600*1200, but only when i play for a long time and then try to exit the game, not during gameplay.

I have a PCI-E card with WinXp btw

if it happends some more i'll probably just try to up/down grade my graphics drivers and hope it stops.. i would hate to turn down the resolution

This comment was edited on Jul 18, 02:06.

Just a thought - even though the videocard is not overheating, nothing says its not the memory overheating. As you know, videocards today have huge cooling solutions, but memory cooling isn't so common. Anything that makes your videocard overheat generally raises the overall internal temperature of the computer case. Once I bought some Kingston memory with heat spreaders, I find I get fewer crashes during graphic-intensive games.

Edit- also, it's been my experience that the quality of the P/S matters alomst as much as the size of it. Circuit City sells a PC power supply tester fot 10-15 dollars.

This comment was edited on Jul 18, 01:20.

I get the same error lately running GTA: San Andreas on an FX 5700 Ultra. Only started getting it after I went to 77.whatever drivers (once I thought about it) and I've only seen it when running GTA so far, not that I've played much else lately. I'm only doing 1024x768 for resolution, but get a BSOD about once every 3 hours or so of game time. I've been wondering if it has something to do with shaders.

I have 550W PSU -- A good deal over their suggestion for the card

is it a quality PSU? have you gone into BIOS to check what your 12V lead is running at, and just as importantly, how stable it is? i've been doing a lot of PSU research lately and have found that wattage isn't always a very good indication of the quality of the PSU. if your +12V lead is running low (EVGA recommends getting at least 11.75 on that line for 6800 cards) or fluctuating a lot, it could cause problems.

i recently ran into this issue with my system...

He prob wants to run it at a native LCD screen resolution would be my guess...huh blue?

Ayup.

And to the poster that asked, it's not choppy at all at that rez -- it's just that it crashes.

It’s not wise to own a high end LCD that isn’t widescreen in this age IMHO

Hey, it was (relatively) cheap.

It is almost 100% a power supply problem. You are crossing a threshold of too much power draw when you get to 1600x1200

I have 550W PSU -- A good deal over their suggestion for the card.

This comment was edited on Jul 18, 08:32.

Lord of the Rings is like Deus Ex. Great game with multiple ways to complete the objectives with as little hype as possible (Not talking about the movies, im jsut talking about the books).

i say that is a strange metaphore.how can u complete a objective multiple ways in a book?it 's a book,u are invited to a journey where author is the driver,you just enjoy or hate the ride.

anyway,is new harry potter as good as the last one?

I can generate a BSOD in two notes!!

i wanna know what it is about BF2 that causes it to crash my computer and reboot.... it happens every once in a while - most often right when the action is getting good

________________________
music from space captain:
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/6/errantways_music.htm
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/4/invisibleacropolis_music.htm

If you're seeing a real actual BSoD in WinXP it's most likely you are witnessing a driver or hardware problem. Sometimes services can cause it, but generally they are trapped-out just like other applications.

But hey if you're going to be a pioneer and push the envelope by doing things like running new games at higher than 1024x768, you got to expect to run into issues.

"It must be the application" is what driver developers say until they can catch-up.

Surprised no one has mentioned this yet but a quick and free way to check your memory is with Memtest86.

Blue did....in his post about his problem...

“I find the most erotic part of the female anatomy is the boobies.” -Zap

Surprised no one has mentioned this yet but a quick and free way to check your memory is with Memtest86. I have found a couple of bad stickes of memory with this and also cleared many a stick to find that my problems were elsewhere.

http://www.memtest86.com/

It is higher res, in places, although it's from the same source photos. Try seeing how far you can zoom in on Cambridge, MA in Google Earth, and compare that to Google Maps.

And of course, Google Earth has height data so you can fly through the Grand Canyon, 3D buildings in major cities, etc.

This comment was edited on Jul 17, 22:30.

i have never experienced a BSOD with BF2 on a Win2K system. the game crashes once in a while but thats after a long session. the crash it seems is caused by a "memory deallocation error". i dont know if its system memory or graphics card memory.

Well this is probably old news but I downloaded Google Earth yesterday and have been playing around with it. Wow, this is one cool piece of software, I can see my car parked out front of the house. I have been at it for hours, checking out cool locals, I hope they eventually high-res the whole planet.

It's cool, but you can do the same thing @ maps.google.com. I was hoping it would be higher res that what the web site offered...



--------------------------------------------------------------
GW: Nilaar Madalla, lvl 20 R/Mo / Xylos Gath, lvl 10 W/Mo

I have to apologize for the way I feel... http://www.nin.com

Well, Blue, I'm not going to say this is your problem, but I thought I'd share a similar problem I had with system crashing in the Doom3 expansion pack. I have en eVGA 6800GT, P4-3GHz, 1.5GB ram. I played through several games just fine but when I got the Doom3 expansion pack, my machine started crashing at seemingly random times. I tried several versions of drivers, disabling video features, changing other settings, killing background tasks, verifying DirectX versions etc.

I have dual monitor so I opened the display settings and switched to the temperature monitor and moved it over on to my second monitor. Then, I ran Doom3:ROE on the main display and watched the temperature climb as I played. Like you, my alarm is set at 120 so I thought that should be a safe temperature. But, when I was playing, I observed that my system *always* crashed right at the 85C mark. No matter what, if it hit 84, I'd be seconds away from a crash. I got myself an Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 5. It's hideously huge and invasive, but my gpu has not gone above 65C and I have not had a single crash since.

Just thought I'd share that with you. It cost me about $40 at NewEgg and I figured it would be worth a shot.

Good luck!

Terry

This comment was edited on Jul 17, 21:38.

Well this is probably old news but I downloaded Google Earth yesterday and have been playing around with it. Wow, this is one cool piece of software, I can see my car parked out front of the house. I have been at it for hours, checking out cool locals, I hope they eventually high-res the whole planet.

EDIT if you have not tried it yet, get it, its awsome and check out the links to things people have found.

This comment was edited on Jul 17, 21:35.

Batman: my thoughts exactly, impressive reading by funkster (who isn't new).

Reality is a nice place, but I wouldn't want to live there!