help

[Zahiar ahmed]

when i run a game. 10 minutes later the game freezes and
the computer restarts. This happens to all of my games :
nfs underground,halo and colin mcrae rally 03 and 04.

System specifications
amd atholon 64bit 3400+ cpu
gigabyte k8ns pro mother board
1.5 gig ram
80 gig hard disk
sound blaster audigy 2 zs platinum pro sound card
gainward geforce fx5950 powerpack 256mb graphics card

all of my drivers are update and my windows xp
proffesional is up to date.

cheers Zahiar Ahmed

 

[John J Sinha]

Hi Zahiar,

Does this happen only in games? You can do this right click my
computer>properties>advanced tab>Startup and recovery (settings tab)>system
failure>uncheck automatic restart. Now when the same thing happens, Windows
will not restart automatically and you can see what error is causing this to
happen.

Make sure you are using the latest version of Direct X from
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.aspx . Restarting can
happen because of an oveating CPU. Get a software to monitor your CPU
temps. Which PSU/SMPS are you using? How much wattage?

Thanks.

 

[Nathan McNulty]

How is the heat in your computer? It sounds like your hardware makes a
great candidate for an oven. nVidia drivers allow you to see the
temperature of the card and you may want to try using a program like
Motherboard Monitor (http://mbm.livewiredev.com/) to record the temps or
give you a warning. Also, I would try uninstalling all of my drivers
(in Safe Mode even), then reinstall all of my drivers and see if the
problem still exists. Also, make sure DirectX is up to date.

 

[Zahiar Ahmed]

These are my system temperatures
motherboard=25 degrees celcius
cpu=44 degrees celcius
graphics card=50 degrees celcius

all these temperatures are taken when my system was idle.

cheers zahiar

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Well, it definitely isn't heat. Try uninstalling your Sound Blaster
drivers, your video card drivers, and then reinstall them and update
them. Try reinstalling your chipset drivers as well. And finally, try
reinstalling DirectX 9.0b. If, after doing this, it still does not
work, you can try doing a repair install on Windows which would require
booting off the Windows XP CD, selecting Install first, then press R to
repair the installation

 

[Joshua Smith [MSFT]]

I wouldn't rule out heat yet. The OP said the temps were taken when the
system was idle and probably not doing 3d graphics. Once a game is started
though the cpu is going to go to 100%, the gpu is going to get used more and
everything is going to heat up. One other thing to check is your power
supply. Is it sufficient for the amount of hardware you are running?

Joshua Smith
DirectInput and OpenGL Test Labs
Microsoft

 

[Nathan McNulty]

That power supply is a good point. His setup must eat a ton of power.
I said it probably wasn't heat simply because my system is similar and
my temps are much higher than his at idle, so I can only imagine what
mine is when playing games. The CPU should take upwards of 90C, video
card should be able to handle 90C too, but there are three areas I can
think of that he may be overheating. The RAM can overheat easily, the
chipset can overheat fairly easily as the cooling on it isn't usually
very good, and finally is the harddrive that could be getting too hot.

 

[zahiar Ahmed]

my psu is 520w.
my hard drive has got a cooler on it. and my case came
with 7 fans which should keep the chipset cool.