computer locks up whlie playing games

[animefanatic]

Hi guys,

My computer seems to have this problem when I play more high end games like (half life 2 or doom 3) after a little while of playing my monitor will just go into standby and my computer completely locks. The only way I can restart is by hard rebooting. I think it has to do with my vid card but I'm not sure.

My comp specs is:
AMD 64 3000+
Corsair 1 gig ram
BFG Geforce 6800 GT OC
Antec True 480 Watt
250 gig WD HD

My vid card has a GPU temp of 68 degrees. I heard from a friend that my computer is probably doing this because the vid card is overheating but I don't know. I don't believe my ram is the issue and I have the most recent vid drivers. PLEASE HELP.

 

[montag451]

It does sound like the card is overheating.

(Un)fortunately, I don't know much about that card, there may be a setting somewhere to take out some of the extra rendering that you don't need for your game.
Try posting in the General Hardware forum as well.

Some ppl don't like cross posting, but I cant see what the problem is.

WELCOME to the forums

 

[Scrubber]

Hi animefanatic,

What motherboard have you got in there?

 

[aGreenAgent]

Just make sure that all your PCI cards are in the farthest slots from the vid card as possible.

 

[mehmetmunur]

I don't think it is an issue of the video card overheating. But you can try and rule this out by under clocking your 6800GT. Do a search for coolbits and modify your registry with it, then reduce your memory and core clocks.

If your computer still crashes, then you know it is not overheating. Try different sets of video card drivers. Check out the first post on the Video part of the forums. The most recent is not always the best choice for all games. 71.98 has issues with Colin McRae 05 on a 6600GT but 66.93 does not, go figure.

If that does not work, try to borrow someone else's video card to plug in your system in order to see if the problem is with the video card in which case you can replace it.

If that still does not solve the problem, than you are going to have to test all of your components or replace them. Try running memtest to check your memory, and prime95 to check your CPU. Try to plug some of your hardware (CD/DVD ROMs, PCI cards, un-powered USB devices etc.) off in order to make sure that your PSU is not faulty, though I do not think that this is the case.

 

[animefanatic]

 

[animefanatic]

Scrubber: I have a MSI K8T Neo mobo.

Thanks for the reply guys.

 

[Scrubber]

Originally posted by: animefanatic
Scrubber: I have a MSI K8T Neo mobo.

Thanks for the reply guys.

OK, here's the link to the latest BIOS for your mobo. One of them mentions fixing an issue with Corsair RAM.

The next thing to do is to eliminate power management as the cause of the problem. So follow instructions here first of all. If the system stills goes into Standby, then at least you've eliminated that as the cause of the problem.

There's a similar option for the network adapter which you'll find here but I would be inclined to try them one at a time.

 

[animefanatic]

I have the latest drivers for my mobo, but I haven't configured my power management yet. Thanks for that advice. I heard that you may want to have your IRQ for your vidcard to be separate from all others and if this is true my IRQ is being shared with my network adaptor. Do you guys know anything about this?

 

[Scrubber]

Originally posted by: animefanatic
I have the latest drivers for my mobo, but I haven't configured my power management yet. Thanks for that advice. I heard that you may want to have your IRQ for your vidcard to be separate from all others and if this is true my IRQ is being shared with my network adaptor. Do you guys know anything about this?

Your motherboard is probably APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) compliant (most of the latter day ones are) which means that Win XP creates a HAL (Hardware Extraction Layer) and talks to that when loading the OS. You'll be able to tell from Device Manager where you'll see 23 IRQs instead of the normal 15. But because of the HAL, you can't reassign IRQs yourself.
This is one instances where we all have to trust that Microsoft knows what its doing.