Comp freezes while gaming

[Zurxel]

Hi!
My computer has always worked just fine. But one day it just started freezing while I play games. The temps under load seems to be perfectly fine, CPU never exceding 38C and GPU never exceding 76. I have just cleaned the case so there is no dust in it. What happens is that I play WoW for a couple of minutes and then everything just freezes and I have to reboot. Often the screen get's covered with graphical error, like the top of a frame has been screened a hundred times or something. But sometimes the computer just freezes and I see the last frame. I have tested the cpu with Prime95 and there's no errors. I have tested the memory with memtest 86 and there is no errors. I can run rthdribl without any issues. I have reinstalled WoW and updated to the latest forceware. This freeze also occours when playing Quake4.

This is my sytem:
Athlon64 winchester 3200+
MSI Geforce 6600 GT
MSI K8N SLI Platinum
Aspire ATX-AS500W PSU
Corsair 2x512 PC3200
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200 GB
Nec Intern IDE DVD±RW 16x

Would be very grateful for any help!

 

[mzkhadir]

is your video card getting enough air circulation ?

is it getting too hot ?

 

[stu1811]

could be psu. what components are you running?

 

[lissen]

You need to eliminate one thing at a time.

Have you got a large enough PSU to handle all the kit - looks like 500W is enough

Is anything getting hot

Memory problems quite likely here - these do manifest during hard work (gaming) - can you swap out some ram - or remove 1 at a time and see what happens ?

most importantly
What did you last change ? Software and hardware - think back to when it first happened, back off a couple of days - what did you install ? take it out
Have you installed any of those games with Starforce protection - they mess with system drivers - clean them out and see what happens
Uninstall anything that you question

 

[Zurxel]

Thx for the input guys. I am pretty sure I have found what was wrong now. U where kind of on the right track Lissen. When I started taking my computer apart piece by piece I found nothing wrong at first but when I were reinserting the 2 sticks of memory I discovered that one was a little loose. It turned out that the upper of the small catches that holds the memory in place was broke. So I just moved the memory to the other 2 slots and now it seems to be working fine. I guess it had a very instable contact with the MB and that was what made the freezes so random.

Anyways thx for the help! Back to the gaming now I think