Hello, I've recently gotten my hands onto the game The Witcher 2 for pc supposedly one of the best looking games this year, but, there is a pretty major issue. It causes my PC to overheat and reboot, so today I've had my cabinet and the majority of my PC's interior cleaned from dust with a compressor. Yet, nothing changed. I already had the PC opened up after cleaning it out so I thought I'd run the game and check what was causing it to overheat. I held my finger on 1 of 2 two mushkin 2GB ram and they were both very hot I then held my hand under my Asus motherboard where my ATI Radeon 5700 Graphic card is hidden and noticed hot air blowing from it's fan aswell. When I bought the custom made PC from a site I've long forgotten I did notice that the graphic card which came along with it had reviews of it becoming fairly hot in comparison but could perform just aswell as it's cousins and for half the price. So I figured that the graphic card itself may be the thing causing the overheat / rebooting. I hope that someone can tell me what exactly is causing my PC to overheat & restart. Here's my PC stats: Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601) Processor 3.40 gigahertz AMD Phenom II X4 965 512 kilobyte primary memory cache 2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache 6144 kilobyte tertiary memory cache 64-bit ready Multi-core (4 total) Main Circuit Board Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. M4A77TD Rev X.0x Memory Modules (Ram) Mushkin enchanced 2x2 GB PC3-12800 (996778st) Mushkin enchanced 2x2 GB PC3-12800 (996778st) Drives new – drive encryption 1000.10 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity 665.25 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space Optiarc DVD RW AD-5240S ATA Device [Optical drive] SAMSUNG HD103SI [Hard drive] (1000.20 GB) -- drive 0, s/n S1VSJ90Z111802, rev 1AG01118, SMART Status: Healthy Main Circuit Board Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. M4A77TD Rev X.0x Bus Clock: 200 megahertz BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 0305 09/10/2009 Display ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series [Display adapter] Driver software: AMD Catalyst™ 11.8 Thanks in advance, -Jaf. Don't mind my grammar, I'm Danish!
Hi, Have you already cleaned out any dust that may be inside the computer case? If dust builds up on components, fans, and fan intakes and outtakes, that can cause over heating of components. Also, if there is not enough airflow in the case, heat will build up inside raising the temps of the components. Something else you can try is playing with the side of the computer case off, and also taking a box fan that you would normally put in a window and let it blow on the system board. During the summer time, heat from the environment can make a system that runs hot lockup/shutdown etc. You also may want to install a system temperature monitor program such as speed fan to see what the temperatures are on the system board. You may also be able to find the cpu temperature in the BIOS to see how hot it is getting. Make sure that all the fans in your case are working including cpu fan and GPU fans. If the cpu or gpu are still running too hot, you can try to reapply thermal paste on them. If the paste is old it can dry out and then will not conduct heat to the heatsink efficiently. Another thing to note too is that random reboots can be caused by things other than heat as well. Faulty Ram and a failing power supply can cause these too. It may be worth it to run a Memtest86+ to see if any of the ram is going bad. If you have another computer, you can try swapping powersupplies to see if that resolves it as well. If the game is visually demanding, it may be taxing your graphics card more than other games, making it draw more power than before. If you play the game at lower settings, does it still reboot or will it run stable?
It will reboot regardless of the setting, I've already had it run with the cabinet open open. I've also had speed-fan AND the AMD Catalyst™ 11.8 to monitor the heat and it get up to 75 degrees hot before crashing! (Celcius) Now the question really is, could the RAM cause the restart due to the heat they generate, or is it the graphic card? I've noticed that if I stop the game moments before my graphic card and the interior hits high-temprature I'll have alot of graphical glitches, thus perhaps idicating that the graphic card is failing due to the intense heat and is unable to recover? I've had a few times where the screen goes black and then the graphic card 'recovers' according to the little message I get from windows. Your help is appreciated. Edit: I truely doubt it's the power supply, more power would just cause it to generate more heat, no? I'll try it regardless if nothing else works.
Hi, Overheating ram or overheating graphics card could both cause computer stability issues. There are fans and other cooling solutions you can buy to specifically for ram and also for video cards as well. Graphical glitches could be a sign of an overheated graphics card or a damaged one. You could try reapplying thermal paste to the GPU on the graphics card to see if that helps with its cooling. Also, if you have another graphics card, try swapping it out to see if it makes a difference. If it works, then you know the card is the problem. Also, if you havent done so already, try running memtest86 on your ram for a few hours to see if they give errors. If they do, that means some of the chips on the RAM are faulty and you would need to replace the Ram. Damaged or faulty ram can cause crashes, lockups, and reboots on a computer.
