Vista - Nvidia + Vista64 mostgame Crash / Freeze

Hello, i'm posting here 'cause i'm desperate
My pc worked fine some times ago, but now vista crash with the most of games.

Just to made some titles Grid, SimCity Civilizations...
my configuration is that:

Vista x64 Home Premium
Motherboard Intel DP35DP with Q6600
4GB OCZ DualChanell 800Mhz 5-5-5-15
Geforce XFX 8800 GTS (driver 175.19)

the tipical behavior is that
the game looks works fine until it will stop to respond to any control
the mouse pointer will not respond and the keyboard also.
the Sound / Music will go on for a while, just like nothing appens... after a few seconds the sound will freeze too, and looping .
yesterday i've listened a whole song before the sound be freezed too.

Old game like Caesar IV or Flatout2 works fine, so i'm going crazy about that ...
This is a realy frustrating situation, so much that i'm thinking about to go back to xp.

Check all your drivers - with that 8800 GTS, if it is a G92 based card, then also look into the new beta 177 drivers that allow you ot run nVidia (formerly Aegia) PhysX software - will make games much more responsive that utilize the PhysX engine - like Crysis.

Finally, just so you know - look at my specs - and I have no issues with Race Driver GRID at all.

Like johngalt said, make sure all of your drivers are up to date. I've had sound drivers cause problems in game for me before. Is any component in your system overclocked?


Johngalt, unless I am mistaken, Crysis does not utilize the Physx engine at all.

You're right - They developed their own CryPhysics engine....

Hey Max,

I am having similar problems to what you are experiencing - as are many other people. Check out this link to a forum on EVGA motherboards - Report freezing in games here

The assumption there is that it is due to the NVIDIA 790i chipset, but looking at your rig specs it sounds like they might be barking up the wrong tree. I have had the exact same problems and have been desperately searching for an answer to get my machine stable during games (the worst seems to be Assassin's Creed).

No parts of my system are overclocked (in fact clocking my memory below spec for now to ensure stability). I have run memtest for hours and hours to rule out a memory problem and I have made sure that my BIOS and all drivers are the latest and greatest.

I have had a couple of non fatal errors where a game will crash and tell me the display driver stopped working, so it might be that. I suspect this is some sort of BIOS or driver problem (likely to be chipset, video card, or sound card driver) but I don't really get any useful logs out of the system - just a complete freeze with audio looping the last half a second of whatever it was doing.

My specs are:

• Processor: Intel QX9650 @ 3000MHz
• Motherboard: Asus Striker II Extreme with BIOS 0901
• OS: Vista Premium x64
• Memory: 2x2GB OCZ ReaperX DDR3-1333 running at DDR3-1066 6-5-5-20
• Video: XFX GTX 260

If anyone has any insights on this problem it would be greatly appreciated...

thnx all for reply

actually none of my components are overclocked, i've checked the intel website but none of drivers are updated, so everthink on my pc are new and shiny..

thnx DoctorP, i'll post there too.

Did these games run fine a while ago or have they always been problematic? If they ran fine at one point, but not anymore, then you may have changed something somewhere along the way that's messing them up?

indeed i suppose this should be a sort of conflict/bug that involve vista x64 update and some nvidia files..
my feeling is that some of the last driver use some advanced nvidia function that will drive pciExpress driver to crash.
Looks like some strange bottle's neck 'cause the rest of computer works fine until everithing still freezed waiting the videocard/pciExpress that will never respond.

anywai i've noticed also that the mouse and keyboard are the fist thing that stop to respond with the videocard.... i will format my pc soon.. and if god will assist me i'll try the computer without Vista SP1, 'cause my filling is that the problem start with that.

Not sure I saw the answer in there? Did the games you mentioned ever work or have they always caused problems?

Not patching to SP1 is something you will be discouraged to do, for a variety of reasons. However, as it pertains to gaming, SP1 brought a lot of stability.

If the mouse and keyboard are the first things to go, maybe the problem lies there? Are they USB devices?

ehe.. i'm not sure, it's the first time that i play at civ:soc. on vista.
but i've played with grid some times ago and it was working fine with vista x64