For some reason my comp is restarting by itself when I am playing some intense graphic games such as BF2, HalfLife, or CSS. It only restarts while I am playing games and not while I am doing other things. My comp does not display a blue error screen it just restarts. Sometimes when it boots back up it shows that a serious error has occurred and other times it does not. I have installed the most recent miniport drivers for my motherboard and the new nvidia drivers (78.01) and it is not solving the problem. I had this problem earlier and I thought that it might have been that my power supply was not strong enough (350W) so I got a new one (550W). I also thought that it might have been my ram so I did a memtest 86 and it showed no errors. I have also done a virus scan and a spyware scan and I have none of either. I have also reformatted and that did not solve anything. My video card is not over heating, nor are my hard drives. This link will show u all of my system specs Along with those are these - 550W Aspire Chameleon Power supply - 2 hard drives -- 1 10,000 rpm 32Gb WDC Raptor -- 1 7,200 rpm 80Gb Dell Hard drive (Took it from my other dell comp) Thanks in advanced
This sounds like a heat issue -- did you check your CPU temp? Maybe your CPU cooling fan has deteriorated to a point where it can't cool the CPU fast enough. Other than that, if you're sure your Video card is in top shape, this leaves your memory: it's overheating. Are you overclocking anything?
i am not overclocking any thing and i dot have an over heating problem i might want to try sending more power to my ram though but my BIOS does not have that option
How have you confirmed it is'nt overheating? It would be advisable to make sure the CPU and GPU heatsinks are secured firmly to their sockets! Also you probably should run memtest for about 10 passes (at least) as they usually show errors after long periods of stress-like most components!
Since you seem so sure it's not a heat issue, then logically it's got something to do with your PSU. But you say it's new (550W), hmmmm.. Could it be your AC input voltage dropping below 10% of your normal supply? Try an AVR on your AC Line. Another thing -- take out the whole mobo and peripherals and run them outside the casing. If it works well, your system casing needs more ventilation. But then, that would be a heat issue - which yous say is not.
That's exactly what you want to do. Memtest takes a good hour to really heat up your RAM, so I'd run it at least 2-3 hours for starters, and overnight if you can spare it. If the RAM passes, keep an eye on your CPU temp. If you see that it's over 50*C or so at idle and/or is getting around 60, that's an issue there. This is assuming the heatsink is installed correctly and the fan is working.
That rules out the CPU. How about your Video Card? I know you say it's not overheating, but do you have any way of telling us what its temps are? I came across a similar situation as this, and it was caused by a defective memory chip on the video card.
While that is on the warm side, that doesn't sound hot enough to cause restarting. I'd look at my motherboard and make sure you have all power connectors on it plugged in, as well as any power connectors for the video card plugged in. While I'm not sure of the quality of power supplies, the amperage on the 12V rail seems to be quite robust at 36A. You also might want to try resetting BIOS. If you can't find or don't know where the reset jumper is, you can always pop out the battery (with the power off and the power to the power supply turned off) for a few minutes. It's possible there's a setting that's screwing with something. Without knowing exactly what's been altered, if anything, it's much easier just to reset it.
yeah i am still getting my random shutdowns as well and i cant put it down to CPU overheating, its at 24*C idle, power supply is now excellent and supplies more than enough power...and the other day it crashed several times while i was attempting to play a game, so i think it may be graphics card or ram, but the ram isnt bad as i tested it with memtest so maybe my old crappy GeForce FX5200 overheats, it is only cooled by a heatsink and there are fans blowing over it on the side of the case, but as i have no way of monitoring temps i dont know. i might try some heat spreaders for my ram, i seen some with weird lights, and i love my lights...
Yea Big B i tryed what u said bout the battery on the motherboard and making sure that the powercables wer all in and it did notchange anything
u said sometimes theres a serious error report after the pc restarts..if u click on view more details, its written in blue 'click here' what does the error report show?that can give a bit of idea as to what may be wrong..
AVR- Automatic Voltage Regulator, or better still, a UPS or Uniterruptible Power Supply. Seems that all your hardware checks out -- so it could be your AC line voltage either spiking or dropping below acceptable levels. If you live near a workshop that has a lot of machinery, this can happen. Noisy AC Lines can also cause computer re-starts. By the way, at 53 deg., I'd put an extra fan over the video card. The core chip may be able to take it, but the memory modules might be getting too hot.
