This Game (May Have) Fried My Motherboard

[Jack Meauph]

I can't prove it, but immediately after installing and attempting to play this game on one of my PCs, the PC started generating massive amounts of heat, the game started behaving extremely erratically, and the PC died.

On restarts, now the PC only displays vertical lines and is unresponsive to commands.

It was an HP Pavilion DV 8250 with Vista 32 bit and an NVidia 8600. I believe this game must create some massive load on the 3D resources, and that creates massive amounts of heat on a portable with the 3D card embedded on the motherboard. Heat killed the motherboard.

At least that's my theory. It's highly coincidental this happened immediately after running Barbarossa.

Anyway, I would suggest the developers try and throttle down the 3D resources loaded by default. I'm not sure what I might have done during the install process, except not unchecking the installation of DirectX 9. Vista uses DX 10, and perhaps when this game was started on my machine Vista tried to use DX 9 and that resulted in the overload?

I would also warn new customers of this game to be careful about loading it on a portable until the 3D usage is looked at and corrected in a patch. The 3D didn't look all that exciting anyway in the few minutes I was able to get a clear view before my computer died.

Take care.

[Obsolete]

Even if this were true, it still is a hardware problem nevertheless.

[junk2drive]

I have a 2002 home built AMD Duron 1.2 with a ATI Radeon 7000 64mb video card. Game works fine so it's not a high requirement game.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Jack Meauph
I can't prove it, but immediately after installing and attempting to play this game on one of my PCs, the PC started generating massive amounts of heat, the game started behaving extremely erratically, and the PC died.

I'm very sorry to hear that, but I don't think the game is at fault.

It was an HP Pavilion DV 8250 with Vista 32 bit and an NVidia 8600. I believe this game must create some massive load on the 3D resources, and that creates massive amounts of heat on a portable with the 3D card embedded on the motherboard. Heat killed the motherboard.

I run this game on a system with a nVidia 8600 as well, with settings at max and it does not get unusually hot at all.

Anyway, I would suggest the developers try and throttle down the 3D resources loaded by default. I'm not sure what I might have done during the install process, except not unchecking the installation of DirectX 9. Vista uses DX 10, and perhaps when this game was started on my machine Vista tried to use DX 9 and that resulted in the overload?

The game by default starts with all settings at their lowest levels. DirectX 9 vs. DirectX 10 would not make any difference. It really sounds like your hardware was simply about to fail. This does happen. Probably the next game that put any load on the system would have caused this.

I would also warn new customers of this game to be careful about loading it on a portable until the 3D usage is looked at and corrected in a patch. The 3D didn't look all that exciting anyway in the few minutes I was able to get a clear view before my computer died.

Again, we've run this on laptops as well as desktops and it does not put a lot of stress on the system. I'm very sorry to hear about what happened to you, but it does not jibe with our experiences with this game on many systems, including laptops.

Regards,

- Erik

[SlowHand]

Jack, what you describe sounds very much like your Video Card dying ... same thing has happened to me 3 times (on 3 different machines over 4 years). And was independent of the program running.

FWIW, the nVidia 8600 card I had in my current system failed after 4 months when I was simply doing web email and managing notepad text files. And in my machine, I have a liquid-cooled system with lots of fans. This kind of thing happens.

I've been told you need to frequently clear out the dust from your case, and in particular the vid card, something I only do about every 6 months or worse. Guess that's my way of getting a next-Gen video card every year

[Jack Meauph]

I suspect you're all correct, given that nobody else is reporting a similar problem. The timing of the meltdown (after running Barbarossa a few minutes) is what had me concerned.

Oh well. It gave me an excuse to rush out and buy another gaming portable. One cannot go on without a gaming portable these days. Going with Asus this time around. First one was an Alienware that lasted maybe 18 months before motherboard meltdown. Next came HP, which lasted about 2.5 years. Now Asus. Hopefully heat management on these things has evolved.

I've been nervous about installing the game on my new machine, but I guess I'll go ahead and do it. Thanks for all your replies.

Jack

[Obsolete]

Having this happen just as you're ready to play a new game-toy really does suck.  But don't be nervous now... your new machine DOES have warranty right? 

[LarryP]

I had a heat problem with my laptop last night. I had the shadows turned on the highest setting. I turned it down to the lowest and it cooled down considerably, enough to keep playing as long as I want to. Before that I could only play for about thirty minutes at a time.

Last time I buy a laptop that does not have the best cooling... [:@] Dell Inspiron 1545.

[Arctic Blast]

Dell is awful when it comes to system cooling...whether it's a laptop or desktop, they just don't provide enough in any of their builds.

[LarryP]

My Dell XPS 600 Desktop has six fans and it cools OK, but not good enough. Then I have another external fan that sucks the hot air from behind it. Stupid. [:(] It was OK though until I put a higher end video card in it.