shadowwill

hi there, ok ive had graphical problems in source games (counter strike source ect)
i get these black walls after ive loaded a few maps and a message on the console saying 'E_OUTOFMEMORY'.
and ive been trying to narrow the cause down, first i thought my video card was broken, it was an ati radeon 2400 xt, i sent it back, they gave me a new one, same problems, i bought an nvidia geforce 8600 gt xfx and still the problem persists but takes a bit longer to happen. And so i dont think it can be a faulty gfx card or video driver problems since they are different brands. i also sometimes get system crashes and my pc restarts when playing those games. I heard somewhere that overheating can cause the pc to restart or cause errors. I look at temperattures when playing the games and my video card gets to about 60*c, my cpu 40 - 50*c. Could overheating cause it to crash and have graphical issues? I also noticed that on my nvidia card it uses GDDR 3 memory (htink its GDDR, probably got that bit wrong) but my systems ram i think is DDR or DDR 2, could the problem be that it wont function correctly because of that? i also thought that it could be because of textures, E_OUTOFMEMORY suggests that the vdieo card is out of memory to me, and so textures cant load, coudl it be that when a new map is loaded the textures on the other map arnt unloaded? can a faulty or underpowered PSU cause these errors or crashes? a faulty motherboard? a faulty version of windows xp ? i had troubles installing from my xp disk, some files could not be read or coppied or something but i kept hitting retry and it eventually got past them bit, perhaps its still corrupt?. i got some troubles in other games for example STALKER, that used to crash within 2 - 10 mins on my ATI card but with my new one takes hours to get a crash. is there some kind of system setting that i can use to make sure temporary game files are being unloaded? my ATI card didnt have a fan but my nvidia one does and with my nvidia it takes longer for these errors, could that indicate overheat? like my ATI card gave in quiker because it didnt have a fan?

Please any help is welcome, ive spent a lot of my money on my system and its stressing me out that it wont work right, Thankyou

forcifer

me thinks its a power supply problem. what are the watts/brand of your psu?

shadowwill

blimey, erm dont know the brand, i do remember seeing 'designed for pentium 3' or it could have been pentium 4. I havent cleaned it out ever since i got it second hand and that about 3 - 4 years ago, so it could be packed with dust, it makes a grinding noise for about 5 mins when i turn my pc on and when theres a power cut it wont turn on for about half an hour after power returns. So yea could possibly be faulty hehe. I just read that if my paged pool memory is being overloaded, it can cause source games to crash with black walls and missing models sometimes (which is what ive had), and also mentions a page pool memory lock. Im not at home at the moment so i cant test these things, but its weird that with my new card it lasts longer, so it could be overheating. theres so many possibe reasons for it its so annoying ! it makes my head spin !

any other suggestions?

forcifer

its powersupply. i think you should probably get a new one soon. how much would you think you could allot to that cause? and what country are you from? that will be needed to show you what is needed ordering wise. i dont think its heat 60c is high but doable. my x1950 has been at 100c and it still kept chugging (nearly melting) along

shadowwill

well, what ill do is buy a new one, buy a new cooling case and sort some other stuff out, everything in the pc is brand new apart from that power supply so you could be right.