I agree with your suspision of the video card, but I think it might be the powersupply not having enough spare capacity, I have seen articals on the web that suggest power supplies can lose up to 30% or their rated power rating in one year due to component aging.

the 4870 wants at least 170watts fo the card, each hard drive wants at least 10 watts, the cpus can use from 40 to 160watts the motherboards can use 20 to 80 watts, the opto drives want up to 30 watts

so I would suggest puting in a 650watt or LARGER ie 750,800,900,1kw power supply as the first test point

harpo

darth what are some of the other games?

harpo

i don't know wow or silent hunter 4, but of the other two civ 4 should work in a 2d card and spore wants a 3d but works in a gf5200 which is a similar vintage to your 2600, BUT sins works in an integrated cideo card in laptops, as far as load on a system the cpu workload  appears least with civ4, then spore and sins most cpuload. another thought might be the cpu heatlocking on you,

sorry but it is trail and error to solve this

harpo

it could be although the usual overheat is a instant shutdown of system, it could also be mb overheating or ram overheating/flaky

harpo

OK, with a 4870 (I'm jealous by the way) there is no way that SoaSE will be asking too much from it.  It should barely need to turn the fans.

It could be the exact opposite, particularly if you have turned the graphics options down.

Some games can end up overheating a graphics card by asking it to do too little.  It sounds nuts I know but with the card doing little or no real work it ends up shoving frames out so fast that it overheats just from the massive frame rates (I'm oversimpliying a bit, but thats the gist of it).

GalCiv 2 had this problem and had to introduce a throttling option to the graphics settings.

A few things to try:

1) Make sure you are using the "Application defaults" (or whatever the equivalent is) from the graphics cards own display settings.  Especially do not force it to turn off vertical sync.

2) The 4870 is a dual card in a single slot (if Im not mistaken), so turn OFF Crossfire mode for this game.  You probably don't actually need it for SoaSE and some games don't like it anyway.

Edit: Scratch that last one - sorry it's the 4870X2 that's a dual card.

3) Turn the games graphics settings up to their max - that card can take it, no bother - enjoy.

Also do the memory and power supply tests that others suggested.

Throttling: In GalCiv2 Option / Video / Throttle frame rates.

However, for not seeing the cursor in GC2 you might want to try turning ON "Hardware mouse cursor" on the same settings page.

Theres something odd going no here, assuming that your new power supply is beefy enough you shouldn't be having problems like this. 

Looking on the less obvious side of things - make sure you aren't running anything else whilst running the game - turn off everything you do not absolutely need.  Just in case there's a clash with something else you are running.

It's conceivable that the game data is corrupt or maybe even just very badly fragmented (although the latter would not normally cause a crash).  You could try a defreag of your hard drive and then try uninstalling and re-installing the game if that didn't help.  Maybe even a "check disk" on the drive just to be sure.

You also say that other games work - have you tried them since you started getting these problems with SoaSE?  Maybe this is a fault that has developed with the card since you last played those games.

winxp sp2 is almost a MAJOR rewrite of the os for stability AND security issues, unless you are on dialup get sp2(258mb), although sp3 has sometimes failed to install for me on some of my customers machines the failure rate is only 2-5%, it does fail to install then I suggest sticking to sp2.

refering to reply#11 if the hdd is "rattling"  and suddenly stops then it could be a bad sector on the hdd and I would suggest a LOW level test of the drive with a tool like spinrite from www.grc.com. I have had similar problems in the distant past where the computer locked up after making odd noises from the hdd, & after backing up ,reformatting in dos, restoring the backup the problem disappeared, which was before I found spinrite, after spinrite I boot the spinrite cd then run a level4 diagnostic on the hdds, let the computer run till the diagnostic finishes, then reboot back to windows & evrything then works

sorry about the long post but I hope this helps

harpo

if the problem IS a bad sector then running spinrite is the quickest answer to eliminating the problem, game re-installing is not likly to fix the problemas the bad sector might be in the SWAP file or the registry, which means that the problem could get worse

harpo

I would suggest talking it over with the card supplier and hinting that it might be a maufacture fault involving the RAM on the card

harpo

to test the card for overheating try the 3dmark benchmarks like 3dmark06 an 3dmark vantage from www.futuremark.com

if the card locks up when running either of the 3dmarks then the card is FAULTY. the PALIT cards have a better fan/heatsink design, so the supplier might be willing to exchane toward the palit 4870 card

harpo

An overheating 4870!?