Tallos

Hi there. I bought Oblivion when it came out and have been upgrading my computer since to get it to run at the best I can with my $400+ paychecks.

So anyways, my specs currently are as follows:

550W Diablotek PSU
MSI K7N2 Delta - Motherboard
BFG Nvidia 7800GS Overclocked AGP8x - Video Card
Dynex DVD ROM 16x
AMD Athlon XP 3200
1GB of PC3200 RAM

Whenever I run Oblivion, the detection says my settings can run Ultra High. I even installed the patch and can set it on ultra low, but here's what it does:

Must run on Low details for outdoors to prevent LOW framerate (sometimes down to 2 FPS)
Freezes on Save Screen, then reboots
Freezes during gameplay, then reboots

Now, the video card runs at ~45 degrees Celsius the whole time. Could it be a bad disk that's making this crash? Overheating? Conflicts with power or my mobo connections?

I'm really anxious to get this game up and running, and I don't want to play on Low for an hour or so, only to have it reboot. If it is overheating, my simple solution will be to buy a PCI Fan Card and cool my entire system down.

Any and all help is appreciated. Thank you in advance.

gamerman0203

What might be happening is the game is scanning your hardware to determine what setting to run it at. It might not be looking at actual current running conditions, ie. process, etc. So I would suggest to try and shut down some processes to free up some ram. you do have 1GB however so that shouldn't be an issue. Your processor is out of date so that might be also making a difference. Does your mobo run your AGP at 8x? that might also be an issue if it is too old to do so. Just throwing some things out there. Good luck!

P.S. Diabloetek PSU's are on the lower end of the spectrum so the power might not be stable enough to run your system efficiently.

Indoril Nerevar

I'm inclined to agree with gamerman. Your video card and RAM are plenty good enough to play Oblivion, but the CPU is letting you down majorly. You really need a 64bit CPU to get decent gameplay out of Oblivion.

The motherboard supports 8x AGP, so that's not the problem, and if your video card runs at 45 degrees, it's not overheating. The rebooting could be caused by the CPU overheating (find out what temperature it runs at in-game), but it would do the same thing in pretty much any other game as well.

Have you tried putting your computer under stress in other ways (playing other high-end games, running benchmarks, etc.)? This would be a good way to see whether it's Oblivion-specific, and would also help narrow down the problem.

Check the CPU temp and run some other fairly intensive programs, and let us know how things go.