All games crash in Windows 7, any suggestions?

thepunkerguy said:

Alright, well here is my dilemma. On a clean install of Windows 7 RTM x64, all my games crash after I have been playing them for like 20 minutes. The two main games I have tried are Call of Duty World At War, and Age of Empires III. The games usually just pretty much lock up, but not the entire system. I can ctl+alt+del and end task to close the games. I have tried the latest 3 different video drivers released by ATI and it didn't seem to make any difference. I even tried turning on the video card fan to 100% just to rule out a video card heat issue. All these games work flawlessly in Windows Vista x64 on the same system. Here are my system specs:

Windows 7 RTM
XFX ATI Radeon 4870x2 Video Card - stock
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R Motherboard
2x 640gb WD HDDs in Raid 0 on the ICH10R Intel Onboard Raid Controller
8GB DDR2 1066 g.skill memory
Core2 Duo E7200 overclocked @ 3.8ghz
Corsair 650watt PSU
Onboard sound

Now don't blame it on the overclocked CPU because Vista / XP, memtest, and prime95 never have any issues, the overclock is 100% stable.
Any suggestions?? This is such a pita because everything else runs great on Windows 7.. just not games! bummer! Help!!
- Mike

I know this is a long shot, but are you installing the games to their default installation folders, which in this case would be "C:\Program Files (x86)\"? I have discovered that I can eliminate most compatibility problems by installing to a user-created folder, such as "C:\Games". Like I said, it's a long shot.

You are quick to dismiss your overclock, despite it being stable. Make a note of your overclock settings, then restore to factory defaults to see if that makes a difference. If not, then you can always go back to shortening the lifespan of your hardware by restoring your overclock.

Have you also tried updating the BIOS for your motherboard and your graphics card?

Heat!!

If a system locks up after a certain amount of time then its probably an heat issue!!

Remove the overclock and leave the side off the case (while testing) and try again!!

Good Luck

billdo said:

Maybe the ATI drivers are not controlling fan speed correctly on the graphics card?

Using the ATI driver the fan speeds can be switched to manual and run at max or some other setting when the ATI card is in "Overdrive". This is true for the ATIs I have installed. Not sure about an x2 setup or overclock achieved by another tool.