[Traveller]

After declaring my OCed system (see sig - main rig for OC details) as stable because I:

1. ran Sandra's CPU bench 40x
2. ran Sandra's Memory bench 40x
2. ran 3DMark2001 SE many times
3. ran UT2003 bench several times (& played to my heart's content)
4. Finished NOLF2 and was half way through Hitman II.

All of the above w/o 1 single crash!

Then I got my hands on MoH: AA-Spearhead and didn't even make it through
an hour's worth bfore the first crash

So I decided to tackle the problem step by step:

Was the game buggy?
- Doubted it, considering that it's jut an add-on to an already tested engine.

Was it... the nVidia 41.09 betas?
- No, 'cause I had the problem with the certified 40.72s as well.

Then it occurred to me that this was the first OpenGL game I've played in a while
(aside from a half hour's worth of Q3A).

Again, same problem with either the 40.72s or 41.09s. I thought of rolling back to the 30.82s (the drivers I essentially used when MoH:AA came out),
but before giving up on the drivers, I decided to bring all components of my system back to stock speeds.

Well, guess what - not one crash. This was not good news really, because it meant that
I had to lower my originally-defined stable speeds

So which component was the culprit? The GPU, the video memory, system memory or the CPU?
And what about FSB and/or AGP bus speeds? Nah... couldn't be - with 64M onboard, the AGP bus is probably not even used....

WRONG-O! I returned all components back to the same OCed speeds - with the exception of the AGP/PCI speed (oh, how I do love my P4PE ) and...

... played MoH:AAS all night long

So, the morals(s) of this rather lengthy post are:

1. Never assume anything
2. AGP's a pain.

Now, my shiny new 41.09s tell me that both fast writes & side-band addressing are enabled.
So it could be that if I disable one or the other, the AGP bus will be more tolerant of OCing.

For those of you that cannot control the AGP/PCI bus independant of the FSB should definately play with the FW / SBA options. Could improve stability and/or your ability to reach your OC goals!

cu,