Comp freezed wile gaming

N

Nora

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 7, 2008
Messages
137
I'm not sure this is the right place to put this thread......

What would cause a comp to freeze during gaming? When it does it has to be shut down with the power switch and rebooted. It's a Dell XPS Gen 3 I got for nothing, less the hdd and ram. I put 2 gig of Corsiar ddr2 800 in and a Seagate 320 gig sata. The vid card that came with (oem) was a Radeon x800. Even underclocked it would rocket to 80-82c. Figuring this as the prob, I replaced it yesterday with a Palit 8800GT 512mb. Other than it not getting any hotter than 56c with full eye candy (and way more "coolnesser" graphics) It still locks up. Some times after an hour of game play, other times ever few minutes.
I've checked the power supply and shows no voltage drop wile under a load. It does it with both Oblivian and Gothic 3 without any thing being overclocked. I'm lost for which direction to look for what is wrong.........
 
If you just switched from an ATI graphics card to nVidia, you should use some 3rd party tools to completely remove the old ATI drivers before installing the nVidia drivers. I think there's a program called Driver Cleaner.
 
Ok, I've run Driver Cleaner and all sighns of the old ATI stuff is gone. I thought just uninstalling in the device manager was all that was needed. Now to see if that takes care of it.
 
Is your CPU OC'd? If so, set it back to stock speeds.

Unfortunately there are many reasons why a PC will lock during gaming. Bad PSU, bad card, bad mobo, bad HDD, bad RAM, borked OS install, virus/malware problem, etc.

Also, don't use software to measure PSU voltages. Software reading of voltages are rarely rarely accurate. You need to use a Digital Multimeter to get an accurate reading of PSU voltages. FAQ on it:
http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgpower/troubleshooting.html#DMM

Also, google, download, and run Prime 95 to see if your CPU is stable. Let it run for a full 24 hours to rule out a CPU problem.

And finally, turn off any firewall or anti-virus program you may have on and see if the lockups occur then.
 
Ok, turned out to be the power supply. It passed inspection befor using a load bank that I had made with power resistors to give a 6 amp load. I'd let it run for about 30 seconds with a volt meter (fluke 77) checking the voltage output. All 3 voltage levels did not drop. I did then plug the probes in, as shown in the above link and played my game. The 3 and 5 volt on the 20+4 remained stable. But the 12v on a molex would for no reason or concistansy would drop from 12.2v to 11.8 and would freeze. Tried the psu from another comp and played Oblivion for 3 hours with out it freezeng.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top