Complete power failure while gaming.

[Mitral]

All drivers are up to date. While gaming (Vanguard: Saga of Heros), I sometimes get low FPS. Normal FPS is 25 - 50. Other times, it gets as low as <10. When this happens, it sometims corrects itself if I log out and reboot my system. All other things being equal, I can get normal FPS by just rebooting the system.

Other times, if I am lagging around the < 10FPS zone, I get a complete system power failure. It's just like someone pulled the plug out of the wall. It never happens while the systems is performing well. Only when it is lagging bad.

It should also be noted that this card was recently used in a similar system with no problems what so ever.

I would love to hear peoples ideas.

Bad PSU
Bad GPU
Bad CPU
Bad Mobo

Systems specs are:

MB GIGABYTE GA-965P-S3 P965 775

MEM 1Gx2|CRUCIAL BL2KIT12864AA804 R

SAPPHIRE 100149L Radeon X1900XT 512MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 CrossFire support Video Card

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

OCZ GameXStream - Power supply ( internal ) - ATX12V 2.2/ EPS12V - 700 Watt

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.40 GHz Desktop Processor

 

[MadAmos]

my first thought would be heat you need plenty of air flow and excellent cooling for the CPU and GPU. This does not mean lots of noise but you might start with Core Temp available here or TAT and see what is going on temp wise, I am betting you are getting HOT.

 

[lobbyone]

Maybe include overheating.

 

[gerwen]

**edit** seeing you have a big PSU, look at temps first, as suggested above.

Sounds like power supply problems, although yours looks like it should be able to handle just about anything. Trying a different PSU would be the easiest way to check it. Alternatively:

Is the problem easily repeatable, or intermittent? Is there anything internal you can unplug to take a little load off the power supply? Floppy drives, cdroms, PCI cards, USB devices, extra hard drives?

You could also try the other way as a test. Add a couple more devices that consume power to see if it makes the problem worse.

Powersupply is the suspected culprit. You have to either confirm it as the problem, or eliminate it as the problem and move on to the next likely cause.

 

[Mitral]

Indeed it was heat! My Gigabyte GA-965P has a bios program call SMARTFAN. It is suppose the adjust the CPU fan speed according to CPU temp. Often times the fan would not turn on at all, especially after the computer was idle for a long period of time. Even though the CPU was running at 80 C the fan was still not coming on!!!!

Disabling the SMARTFAN in the bio did the trick. If anyone else has this board, check you CPU fan regularly!!