About a week ago I bought an HP AMD 3500 (don’t laugh, it was a good deal!). I put in a Radeon x800xl. Since you’re going to ask, it’s got a 300w psu. I’m running the 5.7 cats. I’ve got 1 gig of ram
I ran into a weird issue last night. Playing BF2 single player after about an hour or so, the screen pixelated–imagine a 1280x960 dos memory test looking screen. The HD hammered and about 30 seconds later everything was fine again. I wrote it off to a BF2 weirdness. Later, playing EQ2 the same thing happened when I hit a very graphically intense area (the area in Qeynos Harbor where the broker is). Only in EQ2 it bombed out with an “out of memory issue” Naturally, it didn’t tell me WHAT was out of memory. Also, I had been playing WoW for a good chunck of the night.
In both games, I had the details pushed out close to max. 1280x960 in BF2, everything set to high, no AA. ini EQ2, 1280x960, almost everything close to max. In EQ2s case the problem happened when I fell in the drink and I’m pretty sure the reflection rate I had set caused the panic attack (that one was really maxed out).
Thinking it might be heat-related, I felt the video card and the fans were barely on and the card was only slightly warm to the touch.
Other than these two issues, it’s been rock solid. I run HL2, Far Cry and Doom 3 pegged out (although other than HL2, the most I’ve played them is to test out some benchmarks). But, I’ve kicked the tires enough to know the system can handle a decent load. I.E-no reboots or other weirdnesses.
Is the problem that I hit a RAM issue–either not enough, or the low speeds of the HP ram, a driver issue, I had set the settings for both games way out of line for my hardwaer, or r just "one of those things?