crashing on a GFORCE4 ti4600

im having problems with doom 3 and newer games in general, about 2 or 3 minutes after booting up games like doom, halo, splinter cell etc... my screen goes blank and the signal from my vid card to monitor is cut (i get a "No input" error). running a dell dimension 8200 with a gforce4 ti4600, this card should be able to run these games, i just dlled the newest nvidia drivers (61.77) and im running directx 9.0c, all on winxp sp2. everythings updated, i just cant get these games to work no matter wut i do. i read somewhere that agp voltage might be a problem, but theres no way for me to be able to change my voltage in dell's bios (i have revision A09). wut do i do?

Double check your DirectX settings and make sure you don't have a refresh rate override (many monitors cannot handle 1024x768 at 120Hz for example), check your card settings for this also. Failing that, edit the config files and force the games to come up in 640x480 if possible and see if that clears it up. Since it happens in other games besides Doom3 this is almost certainly a system problem.

EDIT: Also, if you have any kind of onboard video make sure it is disabled. I would strongly suggest not messing with any voltage settings unless you absolutely know for sure what you are doing and what your hardware can handle.

IF it is a power thing you may be sunk. but i dont think it is power.

i have seen Dells and other systems use poor power supplies, like say a 175 watt. however in a dell you need a dell or dell compatible powersupply ATX will not work. if you put in an ATX PS you will kill the system.

make sure you AGP drivers are correct, BIOS is up to date and all that good stuff. the Geforce 4 card is abit out of date for doom III. Also could be a damaged card or heat related.

The GF4 is fine for Doom3.

As for the problem, it does sound to me like a power problem, or, more likely, an overheating problem? If the card is shutting down a short time after running a game, it says to me that it's getting too hot.

someone on planetdoom's forum told me to take out my card, reinsert it, and use driver cleaner to remove any old drivers. i have nvidia's newest driver but i installed it over my old one. is that a problem? im gonna post on dell's forum to see what i can do about a new powersupply, hope thats not the problem tho.

Actually i heard the 61.77 drivers have a problem with sp2. I have the same card and had bad frames with this driver after installing sp2. Use a beta driver on guru3d.com, they work great.

I have a similar rig... but run windows98se most of the time.
I have heard that if you downgrade your BIOS to A03, it can help. But I don't know if I can recommend that.
I'd look/ask on the Dell forums. gl.

If the signal to the monitor goes out, that MOST LIKELY means that it can't handle the refresh rate. You don't neccesarily need to chunk it down to 640x480 to get it to work all the time, just go to your display properties, click the settings tab, click the advanced button, go to the monitor tab and set the montior to 60hz. If this doesn't work, try other drivers.

On a side note: I had an old Radeon 7500 PCI card back in the day, and whenever I put it in, Windows XP automatically installed drivers for it. Unfortunately they were AGP drivers, and every 10 mins the signal to the monitor would cut out. So yeah, you might want to try other drivers for it.