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Please take note! For mod developers working with Unreal Tournament 2003, this documentation is meant to be a starting point for your own explorations into UT2003, not a definitive guide. There will be differences between the documentation here and the product in your hands, and you may have to figure out quite a bit for yourself. Check out the Unreal Tournament 2003 page in the Unreal Powered area for links to community sites if you're having problems. UDN is a licensee support site, and cannot provide technical support or game-specific assistance to end users.
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AthlonLockups |
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Last updated by Martin Actor (UdnStaff), for document creation. Original author was Vito Miliano (UdnStaff).
Certain combinations of Athlon processors, VIA motherboard chipsets, and nVidia GeForce video cards will cause a computer to randomly crash.
Please contribute here! Heck, feel free to redo this page to be actually useful. ;P
First, try the obvious. Upgrade to DirectX 8.1. Update your video drivers to the latest Detonators - if you're on XP/2k, grab the Detonator 4 27+ drivers. Update your motherboard drivers. Make sure it's not just "normal" overheating. Update your sound card drivers as well.
I was running an ABit KT7A133-RAID, Athlon T-Bird 1.2Ghz, 640MB of PC133 SDRAM, SB Live! Value, and an Elsa Gladiac GF2 GTS Pro (32MB). For a while, I was running trouble free.
Then, the crash monster got me.
Symptoms seemed to point to the video card (screen freezing, sound would continue for a bit until the rest of the system froze). My system was generally stable while I wasn't doing anything 3d intensive. After updating my video drivers, the system would then BSOD with IRQ_LESS_THAN_EQUAL errors. If you're fortunate enough to get this (bear with me a second), you should see the driver that throws this exception. For a long time, I would see an nVidia driver (nw4_mini or something similar). I eventually replaced the video card with a VisionTek Xtasy GF4 Ti4600.. and the BSOD kept happening. However, another culprit arose - my sound card. I'm under the impression that the sound card is a culprit for other people too. I also had a problem with heating, and after installing a second system fan, my rate of BSOD'ing decreased noticeably.
The really unfortunate thing about the Athlon (or as some call it the Via) Bug is that it's not for every CPU, nor is it for every motherboard and video card. If your CPU isn't cool enough (and Athlons are notorious for getting quite hot), your CPU can hiccup, which is generally a very not good thing. There is also a Loop problem, one where the video card freezes, and data sent to it bounces back to the CPU.
In the end, I ended up replacing pretty much everything (had an excuse to upgrade, why not take it? =). I'm now running an ABit KR7A RAID, Athlon XP 1800, GF4 Ti4600, 1024MB PC2100 DDR, and a SB Audigy Gamer. To my knowledge, the newer boards and hardware suffer far less from the mysterious bug, and despite it all, I still recommend Athlon systems above Pentium 4 systems (even more so with the upcoming KT333 chipset and DDR333 RAM) - Martin Actor (UdnStaff).
http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=64
http://www.viahardware.com/download/index.shtm
http://www.geforcefaq.com/faq.cgi#hw:gef:troub:inst:lockup
http://www.teamanarchy.com/writeups.php?idx=986866324
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