Possible driver issue with ti4200?

ok bit of an annoying problem here

pc specifications:

Abit KG7-raid
AMD Athlon 1700+ at 2.0ghz
512mb ram
gainward ti4200
sound blaster live!
10/100 lan card
60gb maxtor diamonmax hardrive
dvd drive

so heres my problem

yesterday I installed windows 2003, set up all the nice themes and skins, it was looking all great i had these nVidia drivers installed

i tried to play battlefield vietnam (no patch or anything, straight out of box) it loaded up fine then got into the game and after about 1-25 seconds it just crashed to desktop

which sucked, i tried many times - i thought it may just be bfv playing up

so i gave command and conquer generals a whirl, after about 1 sec - 40 secs it crashed to desktop also, but said 'sorry, a serious error occured' this time

slightly annoyed i decided to install some back catalogue drivers, 45.23 to be specific

pretty much the exact same thing happened

so i decided to see if i could get it any better with omega drivers, they seem pretty cool

however no luck, this time it simply mem dumped when ever it had finished loading the game on vietnam and generals

so as a last resort i thought 'it must be win2k3'

i now have win2k installed with the same probs coming at me, i currently have 45.23 installed having tried the latest ones.

oh and it isnt my gpu because i tried an old mx440 and the same things happened :(

please guys can i have some of your expertise?

I would say get memtest and run that see if i that throws up anything.

havnt got a floppy drive at the moment...ill give it a whizz at the weekend

thanks for the flourish of replies guys :(, i guess my pc is unfixable if about 30 people having read it cant think of anything?!

well thanks anyway for the bandwidth and patience......

have you tried a few loops of 3dmark2001 or some other kind of graphical benchmark? one of the computers in our house had a duff stick of ram and would just freeze about 5 seconds in to that... got a new stick of ram, and voila... can you borrow any of Wills ram to try?

Another vote for duff RAM.

If you are getting those sorts of problems consider giving the PC a Prime95 blended torture test (Prime95 runs under Windows so no need for a floppy al'la Memtest) for 10-15hrs.

If it's still up and working after that you don't have a memory or CPU/cooling problems.

As for the VGA, it sounds like that is a real misnomer and is not really at fault.

That said, have you got anything odd setup in the BIOS, low AGP frame size etc.?
Try toggling Fast Writes/Sideband Addressing etc. and see if that helps. Quick enough to find out if you have a 2 min window before it BSOD’s ;).

well, thanks alot for the replies guys
sorry if i was a little impatient but to be honest i just want to find out if my pc is broken for good and therefore can go ahead and upgrade, or, if it still has some life in it yet

im now back on 2003 and im going to try prime 95 first, have you got any links to download sites?

streetster, although i have not yet tried 3dmark2k1 on this install of win2k3 it said on the previous install that i didnt have directx 8.1 installed - even though i had installed directx 9.0c

i will try it again though

im also gonna have a look in the bios, i remember a while ago i was looking in bios and came across something like agp transfer rate which was set to 2x, so i set it too 4x instead

i dont know if that is what is causing all this? but im gonna change it back to 2x and see

thanks again guys, ill post to update if any of this works, if it comes down to it i will just have to buy a whole new pc i guess (i have been looking at getting a athlon 64 system for a while now)

edit: what shall i go with, the latest nvidia drivers or omega? what do you suggest?

Prime95 << Get there from the link.

As for drivers. I would go for the latest nVidia base drivers for now. Play when you have hardware stability.

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streetster, although i have not yet tried 3dmark2k1 on this install of win2k3 it said on the previous install that i didnt have directx 8.1 installed - even though i had installed directx 9.0c

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make sure that hardware acceleration is enabled - check the slider under the advanced tab of Display Properties.. also run 'dxdiag' (start->run) and then make sure directdraw and direct3d acceleration is enabled :) should run.