Vid card problems - freezing!

[Telluwar]

Hello all, and thank you for reading this.

I suppose I should start with specs... I'll first admit that I'm a TREMENDOUS noob when it comes to this sort of thing. It's a Pentium Dual-Core 2.66 ghz.. any more information required can be found as necessary.

So, a friend of mine decided to sell me his old video card after an upgrade. It's an ATI Radeon 3850, I think. We got it in after uninstalling my old nVidia drivers and everything was working fine, but more recently it started to freeze while I was gaming. At first it was just in Aion, then in Heroes of Newerth, too; anyone who knows HoN knows it's not very Graphics-Intensive...

We found out that the card requires 550W of power, and my supply is just 500. So, I took the "new" card out and replaced it with the old card, an nVidia 8600GT, did the driver business, and all that. Less impressive graphics, and, perhaps more importantly, no improvement on the freezing. I cannot game for more than 5 minutes without problems.

Whenever I restart the computer from a freeze, it prompts new hardware; I have no drivers for my SM Bus Controller; furthermore, I'm a noob with no concept of what the hell that is. I've googled it and done a LITTLE homework, but I am still without a hope when it comes to installing drivers for it... what do I do? Thanks for your time.

[south side sammy]

Re: Vid card problems - freezing!

SM bus controller.... goto Windows update and see if it will find it for you. If you have the original disc that came with your mother board it should be on that.... or you could right click on my computer. Goto properties/device manager/.... look for it there... click on the ( + ) marks to open things. When you find it, right click on it and select update driver. It will ask ok to look on line.... choose yes. See if that works for you....... also, if there's anything else in there with a
( ? ) next to it, right click on that and update the drivers. IMO it's good to go through it all once in a while.

Back to the games and the cards. Neither of those cards are great for gaming by my standards. And then you mention the games. You might not think they are demanding graphically but they are newer and probably are. There's more coded in than what you might imagine. Everything you see will tax it.

You also didn't mention what other hardware you have. Really important information you left out. What processor, mother board and what ram and how much ?.... All I can assume is that it's some older hardware and not up to playing today's games. Slow processors, slow ram or not enough ram will kill you. A lot of todays games need at least a dual core processor to run good. And to run great you need speed. More and more a quad core will come into play. There's a lot of rendering that goes on for different things. The more stuff a game has that blows up or how much smoke or fog that's in a map will weigh heavily on memory, processor and the amount of memory you have.

I will go out on a limb here and tell you to get your money back and buy something more adequate.....

[sharonk868]

Re: Vid card problems - freezing!

Hello all, and thank you for reading this.

I suppose I should start with specs... I'll first admit that I'm a TREMENDOUS noob when it comes to this sort of thing. It's a Pentium Dual-Core 2.66 ghz.. any more information required can be found as necessary.

So, a friend of mine decided to sell me his old video card after an upgrade. It's an ATI Radeon 3850, I think. We got it in after uninstalling my old nVidia drivers and everything was working fine, but more recently it started to freeze while I was gaming. At first it was just in Aion, then in Heroes of Newerth, too; anyone who knows HoN knows it's not very Graphics-Intensive...

We found out that the card requires 550W of power, and my supply is just 500. So, I took the "new" card out and replaced it with the old card, an nVidia 8600GT, did the driver business, and all that. Less impressive graphics, and, perhaps more importantly, no improvement on the freezing. I cannot game for more than 5 minutes without problems.

Whenever I restart the computer from a freeze, it prompts new hardware; I have no drivers for my SM Bus Controller; furthermore, I'm a noob with no concept of what the hell that is. I've googled it and done a LITTLE homework, but I am still without a hope when it comes to installing drivers for it... what do I do? Thanks for your time.

Thanks you for the post.
Hi guys, Im a newbie. Nice to join this forum.