Bad video card?

[Golfer76 0]

I've had a problem ever since I started playing the game. I'll play it for awhile and then it suddenly closes and I lose everything since my last save. Sometimes it goes for quiet awhile, but other times it's just in a few minutes. The past several times I've turned the game on, it's been about 10 minutes. My IT guy at work said without looking at it, it sounded like the video card. My computer is 2 years old and has a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 LE video card. I had to buy a video card for my last computer, while playing SC3000. I bought a NVIDIA 3DFusion video card and it seemed to work ok. But I don't remember what model the card is. So I'm wondering which of these I should use, or should I get another one? 

But first, I guess the question is, is it even my video card, or some other problem? I just reformatted my computer last week, so it shouldn't be cluttered with junk. I think I have 1GB of Ram and 235GB of hard drive space. So any advice would be helpful. 

Thanks.

[miguelkuk 109]

It doesn't sound to me like it is the videocard. I don't see why it would cause any problems.

There are however many things I could think of.

There is a problem with the NAM where if you are plopping GLR pieces and your cursor moves over a transit lot (i.e. bus station, subway station, train station, etc.) the game will crash.

It could be many other things, but it's difficult to say exactly what with the information you gave.

[Golfer76 0]

Well I have the NAM, but the problem you described isn't something that I do. For instance, last night, I was changing a lot of my one-way roads into just plain roads. I did that for like 5-10 minutes and it shut down. Also, sometimes when I'm looking at one area of the city and click on the map in the lower left corner of the screen to pan to another part of the city, everything is displayed very badly. The roads don't show up and the buildings are not there. It takes it a few seconds to catch up and show everything the way it's supposed to. So I don't know.

[miguelkuk 109]

Mmmm... You got me there...

I'm afraid I can't help you there, but I'm sure someone else will. Good luck!

[Golfer76 0]

I found an other website some people having the same problem. They suggested that having a dual core processor (which I have) could be part of the issue. One guy said that he turned off the hyperthreading in the BIOS and played for almost 5 days solid and it didn't crash on him. So I'm going to try that and see what happens. Thanks for your help.

[dadyrghluv 8]

get to ur task manager by hitting shift+ctrl+ alt at the same time on ur desktop. right click ur proc and turn to afinity. next turn off AA and AF if u have them enabled. SC4 cannot use these options in the graphics so make sure to turn them off.

thats all i can think of

[Golfer76 0]

Ok, I have no idea what you just said. I followed up until turn off AA and AF. I never saw anything that looked like that.

[BC_Rich_Warlock 1]

i had somewhat of the same thing only it was with World of Warcraft, it might be just the GPU (graphics card)'s fan after a while it will get gunked upwith dust, especially if u have ur computer in a corner or in a nook like in an entertainment console type thing. another possible thing is that if ur using a grapics card from a 3rd party such as crucial.com some times they come with a cd just for that peticular card. but i would recomend that u replace ur gpu fan first. some times the card will overheat when its being taxed, like running 3d games, if ur computer works fine with watching videos online then that would be just 2d graphics, so i would highly recomend replaceing the fan. those are anywhere from $15 to $25 USD. if it persists then im not really sure what to tell u. unless u have bought it from a 3rd party, then i would say look at getting a new cd if u lost ur old 1.