Graphics Card Freeze?????

[Atchikan]

Hi everyone, My older computer had Celeron 600mhz with 128 ram. I had a Geforce 2 mx 400 installed and it worked fine. I used that same card when I upgraded to an Athlon 1ghz with 256 pc-2100 ddr ram. Everything worked fine until I played a game. After about 10 minutes of playing, the game would freeze up. The computer was unresponsive but I could still hear the sound, had to reboot everytime this happened. I had the Nvidia drivers that came out right before XP set. I put the computer back to the original configuration and everything worked fine. I think the card got too hot. Im building another computer with that Athlon 1ghz I had. The case has extra fan in it. Would it be ok if I got a similar card?? If not what would be a cheaper alternative??

Thanks for any information you have.

[Johan Gielen]

I had the exact same problem with my Geforce 2 MX 400, I don't know what the actual reason of the problem was, but I formatted my HD. Re-installed windows and it worked fine again. Never had any problems under XP either. I'm now running on Win2000 and the card is working great with all my games (as far as Win2000 supports them that is...). I'm really positive about it.

I think the best thing you can do is to save your valuable work to a CD-R(W) and format you C drive. Re-install windows, install the Video drivers first (unless a mainboard driver needs to be installed first, but install the vid. drivers asap) and then install your other drivers. After it's all done, start installing the games you'd like and everything works fine again, I don't see no reason to buy a new card.

But if you want a new card, I think GeForce 2/3 is still the best choice.

[Nuclear Krusader]

If you're in the market for a new card, go for the GF3 Ti200. Fast and can be overclocked so it works as a GF3 Ti500.

Stay away of MX versions, as they are just glorified versions of weak nVidia GPUs or crippled versions of more robust (and more expensive) GPUs. HTH