3D apps/games crashing. Please help

Question

Hi all,
My Neo2 machine boots fine and seems very stable until I run a 3D app like 3DMark03 or Far Cry. With these I get flickering textures, skipping, and finally crashes to the BSOD within minutes. My system spec is listed below. I have run Prime95 torture test at 10 priority for 10 hours w/o problem. I am using the MSI provided GART driver (3.77) and the nvidia VGA driver (66.93).
I have tried a fresh install w/o the GART driver and found that 3D apps work fine and run stable for hours, but at lower performance obviously. Does that give a clue as to what my problem may be?
I have a Radeon 9800pro card which I'll try as well just to make sure it's not the 6800GT. Please give me any suggestions you might have. Many thanks.

Answer 1

Problem solved.
I apparently had a bad CPU because the replacement has eliminated all problems. This seems very odd because I never had any booting problems nor trouble with other windows applications. I also passed memtest86 and prime95 with flying colors. I can't imagine that it was heat-related, because sometimes the crashes would occur at the game's menu screen or while still loading. Somewhere I read that the memory controller (whatever that is  ) for the AMD 64 is on the chip. Maybe this function alone was defective when utilizing the graphics card memory and not system memory. This might explain why I could play games fine as long as the AGP/GART driver was not installed. Can anyone explain this? In any case, this is a good lesson for anyone experiencing similar symptoms. I could have saved a lot of time by trying a new CPU first and not last.