Curse

lb402 · May 07, 2005, 06:01 PM // 18:01

I went out all excited and bought the game, a new video card (GeForce FX 5500 256MB) and more memory and spent some serious cash! Of course, when I try to start the game I get sound, a black screen, and my monitor lights all flash. Nothing I have done helps! Is it the video card I bought or are there serious bugs? I did get a response to send my dxdiag to the support people but apparently they are in no hurry to help. Meanwhile I'm just sitting here about to go crazy! Anyone have any advice?

TheFever · May 07, 2005, 06:15 PM // 18:15

I'm not sure, but the 5500 might also need extra power from the power supply. If you look along the edges of the card, you might notice a female molex connector with four little prongs sticking out. You're going to have to find a free molex from elsewhere in your system. If you don't, you might have to go back to the store and purchase a molex splitter.

It might be that your the signal that your video card is sending to the monitor is "Out of Signal Range". You might have to force your video card to give the monitor a 72hz. Go to Start -> Run and type "dxdiag". It'll take a moment for the The DirectX Diagnostic to come up, and then go to the "More Help" tab. Click on the overide button, and type in "72". If that doesn't work, try "60".

To be honost, I owned two cards from the FX5xxx range (5200 Ultra, and 5900 OCed), and I was dissapointed with them both. I'm a diehard nVidia fan, but, for cards from the last generation, I would say get an ATi. I'm not too familiar with ATi's, but I suppose a 9600XT would be perfect for the price you payed for a FX5500. The 256mb video RAM from that generation won't help you unless you run the game in large pixel dimensions (1280x1024, or the holy grail, 1600 x 1200). If you're running 1024 x 768, you can easily get by with 128mb of video ram. Keep the system RAM, because that'll help you with everything else you have. Consider System RAM the poor man's upgrade.

TheFever · May 07, 2005, 06:19 PM // 18:19

Ack, I took a look at the 5500... and they're stripped down 5600's. I would take the card back, period. Like I said, I believe a ATi 9600XT/Pro or at least an nVidia FX5700 (don't get an LE model) would be fine. And, like I said, if you're not running huge resolutions, don't worry about getting 256mb of RAM - benchmarks have show that they're slightly counter-productive at low resolutions anyway for that generation of cards.