GeForce4 Ti 4600

[CursedShadow]

I am new here an appreciate any advice you guys can give me. I have a four year old Dell 8200 running XP Home. It has a Pentium 4 and 1 gig of memory and a 120 gb hard drive. My sons, use this PC to play games, most frequently Final Fantasy XXII on line. They have never had any issues until just recently. Lately after about a hour or two, the game starts slowuing down and thier characters on the screen start flashing. As first I thought this was a hard drive issue as they both got I-pods for Christmas and proceeded to load the hard drive with music files to transfer to their I-pods. They tell me now that they have deleted all these files and they are still having problems. Is there a testing program to see if the video card is funtioning properlly? I downloasded a test for the the hard dirve and it say the hard drive is fine. It is about 60% full. Could this be a heat issue? The game is usually fine for the first hour or so. Any other ideas? As i said, all help would be appreciated.

[Absolution]

does it lock up completely for maybe 20 seconds? that happened to me in ffxi 11 when i overclocked my gpu (same exact computer actually, dell 8200 w/ti 4600)

check to see if the GPU fan died, mine did. i replaced with a zalman vf 700 i believe (its copper and aluminum)

[CursedShadow]

Thanks for the tip. Generally what happens is that the game does freeze for a few seconds and then their player on the screen flashes a couple of times. then all things return to normal for a short period. I will take a look at the fan. I suspect that this may be a heat issue as they usually are able to play for an hour or so before the disturbance begins.