Flickering black screen

[WildAcousta]

Hey guys, was just wondering if someone could help me out. I am experiencing the same problem in UT2003 and 2004. What happens is after a few minutes of playing (it varies normally, but it's usually about 5 mins) my screen will flicker black, then do it again a few seconds later, and then again until the flickering happens really quickly and eventually the screen goes completely black. Then my computer freezes and I have to restart. It's strange because this never happened when I first bought UT2003, and has only happened since I've had UT2004 and updated UT2003 to the recent versions. I'm therefore guessing it's some kind of incompatability problem with the new versions?

Just to let you know, my video card is a Geforce 4 Ti4200 with 64MB. I'm running the latest nVidia drivers aswell.

Cheers for any help! :)

[Gugi]

looks like a hardware-component (most likely the graphics card) becomes too hot. (anything overclocked?).

[WildAcousta]

Hmm sounds like you could be right. As far as I know, nothing in my computer is overclocked. I am admittedly running both games at maximum graphics quality, with everything turned up to its highest, however this never posed a problem in the past, and I managed to get 30fps or more (apart from on MASSIVE maps with lots going on). Or does all that stuff not matter when it comes to the graphics card or another componet over-heating?

[Gugi]

yes, huge errors can occur if the graphics-card becomes too hot, or the pc simply crashes, etc.
I would try to install the newest driver (again), set the graphics quality as low as possible.
Else: have you installed drivers or other software shortly before the errors occurred? perhaps a driver-conflict or something like that.

If the issue still exists, the only thing I could think of which causes these problems is overheating, a damaged Power supply or other damaged hardware.