Vista Game Crashes

[just1tree]

With SP1 on the horizon I figured it was time to buy Vista and give it a shot. I am running a pretty new rig and created a dual boot scenario on my raid setup for xp and vista. The vista desktop experience is fine, no problems there whatsoever. But everytime I try to play a game: UT3 for example, the screen goes blank and my monitor turns off. I can still hear sound in some games when this happens but I have to restart my computer regardless. I have installed the hotfixes for Nvidia cards, and I have tried this with both the microsoft update version of drivers as well as the most recent driver 169.25. Here are my specs:

Vista Home Premium
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (stock 2.66)
EVGA 780i SLI
EVGA 8800 GTS 320
2 GB XMS2 Corsair 6400 DDR2
2xWD 80 GB in raid 0
HIPER 580w PSU

Thanks for any help you guys can give. And yes I can game just fine in the XP partition in case you were wondering.

[BigwaveDave]

Maybe motherboard drivers, or some kind of refresh rate problem?

[just1tree]

Well the refresh rate should be locked down since I have an LCD, but I will try to see how the system does if I install the Nvidia mobo drivers from EVGA.

[BigwaveDave]

Refresh rate for an lcd is definitely not an issue, but if Vista is trying to set it higher than the lcd can handle in a gaming resolution (If your using a diff rez than your desktop) then that could casue this kind of problem for you as well since the monitor can't function over a certain vertical hz.

[just1tree]

Ok, first run through UT3 after installing mobo drivers from EVGA website and still crashed.

*edit: So how do I specify the refresh in Vista?

[BigwaveDave]

Ok, first run through UT3 after installing mobo drivers from EVGA website and still crashed.

*edit: So how do I specify the refresh in Vista?

Does ut3 run for a while...then crash. Or does it crash before even starting to actually play?

If it runs for a while...then crashes. I'd say it's something entirely different.

[just1tree]

I'd say my mileage is about 5 minutes in UT3 before it crashes. But now I have a new crash to add to the mix, I was installing Lord of the Rings online and watching a video through windows media player and about 10 minutes into the video I got the same kind of crash.

[just1tree]

Well I started thinking that maybe it was the audio driver since I just went with the default windows driver, but in the end that didn't make any difference either. I even disabled the onboard audio in the bios and LOTRO still crashed the system after about 10 minutes.

[just1tree]

Well, I think I tracked it down finally. After one of my crashes I went to look at temps in the bios and noticed that the MCP temp was like 80C. I had previously disconnected the fan because I interpreted MB temps at 35C as the NB temp so I disconnected it because of how loud the little fan is. Not sure If i'm going to stick with this board at this point or not if it is going to turn my quiet 120mm fan based box into a screamer with that little fan. Thanks for the help!

[just1tree]

Well the heat was part of the problem, but today I got crashes again. But luckily Vista has this cool feature about Problem Resolutions and told me that it was the Nvidia driver that caused 7 crashes. So I rolled back to the Windows Update driver and no crashes. But... performance of that driver sucks. So anyone got a stable driver they could recommend?

[sumofatguy]

I'm using 171.16 beta with no issues yet. Give it a shot

[rcvirus]

well it's been a couple days just1tree, how have you made out with your problem? Why I have been following this thread is due to the fact I'm having the exact problem. I have systematically gone through every piece of hardware to isolate the trouble and have had no success. I also thought it might be a problem with Vista Ultimate so I went with home edition and and the problem still arises. My next step is to try WinXp other then that I am at my wits end. Someone shoot me, please.

[Finn]

Lol you shouldn't look in hardware when the fault is at the operating system. Use XP it works. ;)