Switch Posted December 23, 2006 Share Posted December 23, 2006 So I've got another one for you. Anyone have any idea why my PC crashes sometimes when playing games? It generally seems to be during times of strain on my system (such as last night, when I was messing around with the Staff of Everscamp on Oblivion and slaughtering scamps by the bucketload... as you do). My monitor suddenly goes into standby mode and won't come back on, and my PC fans (possibly one in particular) speed up. Now, I thought this was probably an overheating issue, but I've checked my temps/fan speeds in SpeedFan and they seem fine (I dusted out my fans recently) and when this has happened before, I've checked my GPU temp and that's been fine as well. Admittedly I can't check that right now as my NVIDIA control panel is broken (thanks to their latest firmware update) but certainly when this has happened before my GPU hasn't been overheating at the time. Also, after one of these crashes happens, my PC often seems to have a hard time booting up again. It's powered all right, the fans come on and everything, but the monitor never comes out of standby mode and there's no "beep" like there normally is to confirm it's loading the BIOS. If I leave it for a while (anything from 10 minutes to an hour) and try it again a few times it boots up. So yeah, that's weird as well. Any ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abramul Posted December 23, 2006 Share Posted December 23, 2006 I would say it sounds like a cooling problem... What happens if you disconnect and reconnect the power cord? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switch Posted December 23, 2006 Author Share Posted December 23, 2006 You mean the PSU power cord? I haven't tried yet. Would that make a difference? I've already pulled the power cord out of my GPU and blown on it, and blown on the connector on the card too to make sure there's no dust, as I was getting squeaks from my motherboard yesterday that indicate a dodgy power link with the graphics card (my mobo is weird like that). I haven't had any squeaks since then so I assume the fans are fully powered. And this latest crash happened after that. Like I said I can't seem to find anything overheating. CPU/HDD are all running at about 30-40 degrees C under normal conditions (shouldn't jump too much while gaming should it?) and I've run extensive checks on my GPU just before crashes while playing Gothic 3 when it was first crashing like this and it wasn't overheating then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark0ne Posted December 23, 2006 Share Posted December 23, 2006 Yes, when gaming the heat really can rise. I remember on my old Ti4200 my system ran at sub-average temperatures but as soon as I spent 10 mins in a game it'd give graphical glitches, then restart the PC due to overheating. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switch Posted December 23, 2006 Author Share Posted December 23, 2006 I suppose you're right. I've run a little test with SpeedFan and the NVIDIA CP (switched it to classic mode which seems to work). My CPU doesn't seem to go over 50C or so, but my GPU is a different matter... when I duplicated what I was doing last night, the heat started increasing exponentially, starting at 50C, until it reached 69C, and then my PC crashed. Now that's fairly hot, but it's well within the tolerance currently set in the NVIDIA CP (115C)... is it possible that XFX (who fiddled with the card before I got it from Overclockers) programmed a different tolerance threshold that I can't see in the CP (say at 70C)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switch Posted December 24, 2006 Author Share Posted December 24, 2006 Scratch that theory... tried it again and it's gone up to 73C without crashing this time. Hmm. I've also taken the card out and thoroughly dusted the fan out, however it's still heating up (if anything, it's actually heating up faster than before!). If I run the game on lower settings it doesn't heat up as much (of course). It's never been like this before though, when I got it it was around 45-50C and never went above that, even when on games... So it seems my card is starting to cr@p out, surprise surprise. Still, this doesn't solve my crashing problem, as it doesn't seem like it's due to the graphics card temperature. So what could it be? Any ideas anyone? :huh: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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