BIG Problem with Enemy Territory! (PLEASE HELP!)

(theBishop) #1

I’ve been playing Enemy Territory since the day it was released. For as long as i can remember, i’ve had a problem with it eventually locking up. It happens at some unpredictable time during play. This has been going on for years. The glitch is so bad i have to restart my computer (CTRL+ALT+DEL, ALT+TAB,ALT+ESC,ALT+F4 don’t work).

My current specs are:
AMD Athlon XP 1900+
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe (nforce2 Ultra 400)
1GB Ram (kingston)
Nvidia 6600GT

I’ve made a few upgrades since i’ve been playing ET, i’ve had 2 other motherboards, 256MB ram, Nvidia Geforce3, and a few different hard drives. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the CPU, although, it did overheat a while back, so i had a replacement, but its still a 1900+.

Needless to say, i have reinstalled the game AND my operating system a number of times for various reasons, and its never made a difference. I’ve kept my ET install up to date with all the patches that have been released. I’ve tried different BIOS settings on a couple different motherboards. Obviously, i’ve gone through a number of driver updates. etc.

I also run the Linux client from time to time, both on Slackware, and Ubuntu. I have noticed that the Linux client suffers the glitch less frequently, but it still has the problem.

Considering how much hardware i’ve gone through, it seems like this must be a software issue, but i don’t know anyone else who has this problem. Unless its a CPU issue, but AMD is popular enough at this point that i think i would hear about it if it was an AMD incompatibility.

Also, this problem ONLY occurs with Enemy Territory. It doesn’t happen in other Quake3-based games like Quake3 or Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

(Nail) #2

It sounds more like an over heating prob, if you haven’t already, try running game with case side off and a big fan blowing into case, if that makes it better, load your case with fans. Lots of heat can “dry” out the thermal compound between processor and heatsink, you may need to replace that as well, use “Arctic Silver” thermal compound and follow directions CAREFULLY

(theBishop) #3

But i play Doom3, Half Life 2, Farcry, etc without incident. Clearly those games are more taxing on my resources. And i don’t have any real instability issues otherwise. This is the only program that locks up my computer in this way, and it does it consistently.

(Sauron|EFG) #4

It’s quite possible that all those games are GPU limited, and that ET is the only games that stresses your CPU. (I think it should switch off completely rather than locking up if it overheats, but I don’t remember when AMD introduced their thermal protection.) If you run a motherboard monitor (like Asus probe) you can enable logging of temperature to see what the CPU temp is before it locks up.

Playing with the case open for a while is worth a try if the problem happens frequently enough.

(DarkangelUK) #5

May sound silly, but i agree with the overheating. I play Q3 and after a while it started to completely lock with sound looping, i had to reset my PC. HL2, Halo and D3 would play fine… i slapped a new CPU cooler on and a 120mm fan on the side and i’ve never had a lock up since.

(Lekdevil.NL) #6

Run the Prime95 torture test for at least 12 hours. Use the “In-place large FFTs” test to generate maximum heat in your CPU. Report the results (there shouldn’t be any errors). Run the “blend” test to also test your memory subsystem.

Also, run Memtest86+ to test your memory.