Over the last few months I have been struggling with a rather high amount of crashes in WAW in both Windows XP Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate RC with anything from WAW just stops responding to the game just closing without any error dialogue box at all to outright solid freezes of Windows and even a few blue screens every now and then. What would make me the most fumed would be the crashes would almost always seem to happen while playing Zombies (hosting) and would almost always happen when we are in the higher levels. So in general it wasn’t just affecting me because when I crash everyone else is getting the boot.

I have been trying different settings changes and drivers and flip flopping back and fourth between Windows XP and Windows 7 but from what I can gather after narrowing it down the issues seemed to be mostly related to driver problems with my current graphics card; an EVGA 8800GTS 320MB (first gen). Although the crashes have been a little better using older drivers I am still crashing at times and although I haven’t had any problems with ANY other games except WAW I got sick of it and I finally just ordered a new graphics card.

Enter the EVGA NVIDIA GTX260 SSC Edition; PCIe 2.0, 896MB of RAM, 448bit, 675MHz core, 2304MHz memory clock, 216 stream processors and best of all I haven’t had a crash in over 3 weeks now in the same Windows 7 RC install I was running previously.

evga-gtx260ssc-thumb

The downside is the card is big – even bigger than my old 8800GTS and to get this guy in my case I had to shift all my hard drives down to the bottom as far as they would go and shift them towards the front of the case as far as they would go to where they are touching the grill of the intake fan and I am left with about a sixteenth of an inch between the back of the graphics card and the front of my top hard drive. The other downside is I really don’t see any graphical improvements because my 8800GTS already handled WAW on max settings and it was a DirectX 10 card so I was really already seeing everything there was to see but wow does the GTX260 process everything better. Of course I do get better frame rates but the overall smoothness of WAW on max settings now is much better; along with other games but I really don’t play too many other newer games so once again my 8800GTS handled all of those fine without issue. I guess this is an upgrade for MW2 but I don’t know how that game is going to turn out yet so we will have to see how it performs in the future for whatever I buy.