Gaming problems with cpu need hlp

[jld6969]

Hi the problem i am having is that any game i play on my cpu is always freezes up for about 2 mins then starts to play again. I have a AMD Athlon XP2400 Processor, 256mb of ram, Nvidia GeForce FX 5200,30 gb hard drive. I had our cpu guy at work build this for me 5 years ago and just recently had our new guy put the video card in and a new mother board.It is a ASUS A7V8X-MX.Any help would be greatly appricated. Thx

[PCC-Richard]

Which games is it freezing?

Have you ever got those games to run without freezing? How long has this freezing been going on?

[jld6969]

it started freezing when i had the new motherboard put in. It has froze up on Jedia Academy,Mob Enforcer, John Deere farmer pretty much any new game that i install.It couldnt be that i have little of ram. I orginally had 512 mb in it but with the new motherboard i had to get ddr so i only goot 256mb.

[PCC-Richard]

Well, you meet all the system REQ's for Jedi Academy, so I'm hesistant to condemn the RAM.

Is it crashing / freezing when you do other things? If you load a memory-intensive non-game program, does it still freeze?

If it's only crashing during 3D games, I might suspect the video card....

[jld6969]

Every once and a while it will freeze up when i am surfing on the net.I never had this problem until i got the new motherboard and video card.Is there any sure fire way to tell if it is my video card?

[PCC-Richard]

Hrmmmmm.

Do you have the latest versions of Direct X and the right MOBO + Video card drivers installed? Go to the device manager, and see if there's any little yellow flags.

[jld6969]

There are 2 of them the first is
Universal Serial bus Controllers
->Via Tech 3038 PCI to USB universal Host Controller
Other Devices
->PCI Ethernet controller

Those are the only two that i see.

[PCC-Jon]

With yellow icons in there, I would think it is:

1) a driver issue
2) an overheating issue

The fact that it starts playing again after two minutes is what makes me think of overheating....but those yellow icons in the device manager put up a red flag in my mind that the drivers for the rest of the system might not have been installed properly either.

[TheMattrix]

When I overclock my gpu too far and it gets too hot, it freezes for a while then continues, so to me, it sounds like an overheating problem. But I would also install the newest video card drivers.

[jld6969]

thx for the input.I have all the new drivers for video card.The only thing i do not know is what the universal serial bus controller is?Does that require driver and if so where would i find.Thx again for the help so far is has been a real plessure posting here and getting this kind of help.