After playing Far Cry for a few hours, my computer spontaneously
restarts. I have an Asus p4c800-e deluxe mobo and nvidia geforce
6800gt card with standard drivers. My power supply is 500w ultra
x-connect so I don't power's a problem. My temperatures look okay, so
I'm thinking maybe it's an issue with the video card or maybe ram. I
have 512X2 PC4000 GOLD KIT OCZ RT. Also, I recently flashed bios, but
that didn't help anything. Any suggestions?
You should disable the instant reboot in the OS, and get
the machine to blue screen instead. If I google on
"Startup and Recovery" I get:
Settings
Control Panel
System
Advanced tab
Startup and Recovery
If the computer will not stop on an error and give a blue screen,
then it could be a power problem, or for some reason the computer
has executed a reset. (Even the best, most expensive power supply
can fail. The stats here suggest the power supply is the first
thing to look at, when there is trouble. It is always a good
idea to have a spare, high quality PSU available for testing.
Preferably a different brand than the current one, in case
the problems are design related.)
With the PC4000 RAM, I expect you are overclocking ?
Whether overclocking or not, you should test the memory with
memtest86+ from memtest.org . That will tell you whether there
are any bytes that have stuck values in them.
To test your computing core, use Prime95 from mersenne.org .
The "torture test" option does a calculation with a known
answer, and you should not get any error reports from your
system if it is stable. If the computer cannot pass four
hours worth of Prime95, either the RAM needs some timing
adjustments, or the processor is being pushed too hard.
If the basic core of the machine is stable and passes
those two tests, that leaves the AGP slot and the video
card. Or, for that matter, if there is crappy memory
management in Far Cry, that could account for the problem
as well. I would hope if you can get the computer to
halt with a blue screen, that the error message would
point to either the video driver, or the game, as the
source of the error. If the error message is one of the
error numbers that points at memory, then Prime95 should
also be able to find the instability.
If you have a computer case that makes access to the case
easy, try running with the side off the computer case.
If/when the computer crashes while you are gaming, try
touching Northbridge heatsink, CPU heatsink, video card
components, and see if there are any "hot spots" in the
computer. If the problems stop, with the side off the
computer, then case cooling needs to be beefed up.
HTH,
Paul
