Problem...

[Cass]

So here is my problem mabey some people smart with computers can help me out here.

My comp will run none stop idle in windows forever no problem. but the thing is when i start up any game it frezze's and only thing i am able to do is restart just so it will do it again less than 5 min into the game being re-opened. i thought it might be a tempurature thing so i ran the soltek hardware monitor programe that came with my mother board, it shows in red numbers the cpu being at 150F but I dont know if that is right. I have done nothing to the clock settings and it has the stock heatsink on it. is the CPU over heating? or what else might be wronge here?

my computer is.

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8GHZ
Soltek k8tpro s939
Radeon 9800pro
random Power suply that came with the case
Sound blaster audigy LS

[Splidz]

150 fahrenheit is a little warm but nothing to be overly concerned about I don't think. Maximum temperature for an Athlon XP 3000 is 185 F so you are within the limits. I have overheated CPUs in the past and the computer has never frozen, it's just stopped dead with the smell of smoke and the knowledge that I'm about to put out another $300.

It is possible that your video card GPU is overheating, I would check to make sure that the heatsink on the card is still attached. I had a Radeon once where the heatsink fell off, I found it in the computer but I didn't know where it came from and I glued it onto the CPU instead. After a while my screen would start going all crazy colours when I did anything. This is a long shot though.

To test to see if it is indeed because of heavy processing, I would run some of those graphic benchmarking programs that display 3d graphics and stuff, I think there may be one that comes with DirectX. You may also want to try updating DirectX to the latest version, and also updating your video card's software. You should not be experiencing freezes though regardless of if your software is up-to-date, so these are generally just shots in the dark.

What you want to do is try and narrow the problem down to something in particular. If you think it could be your CPU, try running a lot of processor-intensive software at the same time. In Windows XP you can hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and go to the Performance tab to see CPU usage, try and do whatever you can to crank that up. Try to do things that are hard on your CPU but aren't too hard on your hard drive (you're testing your CPU, not your drive), like: zipping a very large file using the maximum compression algorithm, encrypting a large file, running any kind of mathematical simulation, etc. You should be able to get your CPU temperature up like this and see if it freezes, which I doubt.

Anyway I hope some of this helps. Bottom-line is I think this is probably video card related but it's very hard to tell...

[Splidz]

Check out this thread:

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/15646/

[Cass]

Thanks Splidz.