AOE3 Forums

I have had this problem occur between both AOE 3 and Warchiefs.  During scenario play (never during online play, yet), the game will inadvertently freeze for half a second, then my video card will more or less shut down.  The monitors will go into standby mode.  I can still hear the game sounds, but I can not recover my system.  I have to do a hard reboot.  This happens no less than about 10 minutes into the game.  The latest crash didn't happen until about 30 minutes into a level.  I don't usually save my progress during the game, because I'm fully involved in the play and never think about it.

I have a newly built system.  Fully loaded:
Intel quad core 2.4 ghz
ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard
EVGA 8800 GTX 512 video card
4 gig RAM
500 gig hard drive
Vista 64 bit

Again, I've played the game more times online than offline, and when I play online, this never happens, and I'm running it at 1600x1200.  My system runs Doom 3 and Crysis at full detail and 1600x1200 with no problems, but AOE at 1600x1200 and 1280x1024, I get the same crashes.  I have all the latest patches and upgrades to both the game and my hardware, so I would really love some input on why these crashes are happening.

Thanks.

Sounds like your video card might be overheating for some reason.  Also ensure that your power supply is powerful enough to run all of that.

Also make sure you have the latest drivers for your video card. 

Of all the problems I could think of that would cause this to happen, GPU overheating wasn't one of them.  I had never even checked the temp of the card.  Come to find out that at idle, it was at 70C!.  I don't even want to think what the temp was at load.

I checked the fan speed settings, and the automatic fan setting was hardly getting any air to the card.  Manually setting the fan to a much higher speed dropped the idle by 25 degrees.  This definitely stopped the game from crashing.

My appreciation to you!