Ok, first, here's what I'm running.

Pentium 4 2.4GHZ
Gigabyte 8S655FX Motherboard ( latest F5 bios)
ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB (running the latest Omega drivers)
1024MB Kingston DDR 3200 RAM
350W powersupply
DirectX 9b

I use this system primarily for gaming. I used to get very bad FPS, and someone clued me in that I probably didn't have my motherboard's AGP chipset driver installed. Sure enough, I didn't. I installed it, and my FPS skyrocketed through the roof.

However, now my system seems quite unstable. I can only play for about 10-30 minutes before my system locks up, and I have to manually reset it. So as it sits, I'm stuck between having crappy FPS, but a stable system, or having excellent FPS, but an unstable system.

Some have suggested it might be an overheating problem, but I don't think it is. I have an additional fan in there, and my bios says the temp is at 35 degrees, which should be good. I'm not overclocking anything either.

I've tried lowering my 9800 to 4x instead of 8x, but that didn't help, I still froze up after 20 minutes.

Anyone have a clue what I can do? Are there alternate chipset drivers for gigabyte motherboards that I could try?

Get rid of the Omega Drivers. And stay with the catalyst drivers. Omegas tend to be a bit buggy with some systems. Also, try turning off Fast Writes in Smart Gart.

I'll give that a shot. And I do have fastwrites off.

Alright, I uninstalled the Omega drivers and control pannel, and went with the Catalyst 4.4 drivers and control pannel.

I also took a suggestion from another thread, and gave my fans and heat sinks a good, much needed cleaning.

I'll try it and see how it goes.

Ok... That didn't fix it. But while I was cleaning the heat sink for my CPU I noticed the thermal compound between the CPU and heatsink was a little ... crappy. So i bought some new, better stuff, and applied that to it. Also bought an exhaust vent fan, that takes air from the middle of the computer and chucks it out. Gonna see if that helps any.

Maybe the graphics card is faulty

It's still freezing up... I'm all out of ideas. It never does it in Windows, only when I'm playing a game. Doesn't seem to matter what game, just any game when I'm around 20 or 30 minutes into it.

Can you install another graphics card and see if that helps?

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE CORRECT AN UPDATED DRIVERS FOR YOUR SOUND CARD!! THE SOUND CARD CAN HAMPER A PC'S PERFORMANCE BIG TIME AND CAN MAKE IT CRASH!!!
MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE ONBOARD SOUND DISABLED IF YOU HAVE IT.

IF YOU HAVE LOADED SOME NEW SOFTWARE RECENTLY THERE COULD BE A CONFLICT. TRY DEFRAGGING YOUR HARD DRIVE SO EVERYTHING IS WHERE IT SHOULD BE!!!!!


GOOD LUCK

My money is on an overheating graphics card. Either the case is too hot and, therefore, not allowing tje card to cool. Or the cards fan isn't functioning properly. Or, the card is just defective.

What OS are you running?

Definitely check the soundcard drivers - what card have you got? Sound card drivers are the fasted way to crash a game if they're not up to date.