No Orange Box for you!

So I finally got my new Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H motherboard based system up and stable (its a long story, more of which later) so I thought I'd treat myself and get The Orange Box. I know that my new system isn't a gaming rig - with on-board graphics it was never intended to be, and due to mobo limitations that I just decided to live with, using a graphics card will never be a good solution. However the Intel GMA X31003100 graphics are supposed to be reasonably good - I should at least be able to play Valve's Portal and Team Fortress, both of which look like a lot of fun.

But woe is me - after installing it and hesitantly firing up Portal for the first time it crashes as soon as I try to enter the first portal - I get "hl2.exe has encountered a problem". I fire up Team Fortress and get the same thing. I try TF one more time with a different online map (its all online) and managed to play for a couple of minutes - then poof, hl2.exe terminated unexpectedly all over again. Since it was late at night I decided to give up and investigate in the morning.

The upshot is I spend the entire morning tweaking, rebooting, crashing, tweaking, rebooting, etc. etc.... Doh!

The worst part of it is I can't find anyone else who is having the same problem - the best I can find are hints that Intel graphics may not have the Texture and Lighting (T&L) support that these games need - but as best I can tell the 4864 build (Version 14.31.1.64.4864) of Intel graphics drivers for the G33 chipset should provide them and they have been out since September.

I tried all the Valve suggestions - removing anti-virus software, disabling audio hardware, down-clocking memory, disabling sound in the game, running in a window, tweaking some game parameters, downgrading Direct X use to 8.1, verifying game cache consistency, etc. etc. The only thing I can think of left is to uninstall and reinstall which I may end up doing if I get bored one day.

Hopefully there will be better Intel drivers along soon - but at the moment I feel pretty helpless because I have a feeling Valve will blame the hardware and drivers, Gigabyte will blame Intel and Intel will not even listen to me. If I could just get some verification from another person using similar setup I'd be happy to wait it out - its been a year since I first heard about Portal and I'm sure I can wait another 6 months if necessary.

In the mean time I'm downloading the latest America's Army which I haven't played in a long time, and if that runs okay then I'll get Unreal Tournament 3 when it comes out later this year (soon I hope).

Oh, one other thing to try I suppose - I may install a PCI-Express graphics card and see if it makes any difference. That should rule out any non-graphics related software, my memory and a bad install.

For the record my system is a Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H motherboard with the Intel G33 chipset, ICH9 (non-raid) Northbridge, Intel E6750 1333Mhz FSB CPU, 2x1G of Crucial Ballistics PC6400 memory run at 800Mhz clock and 4-4-4-12 timings and 2.2V memory bus voltage (although I've tried SPD timings of 5-5-5-18 with no joy either). Graphics are the onboard Intel GMA X31003100 running the latest Windows XP (32 bit) drivers build 4864. I've run memtest86 extensively and I'm now running Microsoft's Memory Diagnostic tool as well. The symptom is very consistent in Portal - start a game in the test room and as soon as the first portal opens and you step through it - Boom - that pesky "hl2.exe has encountered a problem" shows up. There are no other errors in the event log other than the unexpected termination - which is just a fault at some apparently random address.

UPDATED 11/27/07: Changed GMA X3100 to GMA 3100 because that is all the G33 chipset has (see my subsequent post Doh! GMA 3100 != X3100). Thanks to Anonymous commenter for pointing out this error.