Computer overheating!?

[Officerdown]

My computer use to beep when I played Left 4 Dead, beep from the mobo. I figured it was because the temp on the processor was set at a low setting. So the beep was turned off in the bios. Now the computer is silent; however, it crashes. I think this is because of overheating.

I'll be playing Left 4 Dead and the screen will freeze up and I can still hear the sound fx, or it will just go to a black screen and the computer will have to be restarted. It just started doing this when the weather got hotter. I did NOT overclock.

If the computer is overheating, any ideas how to cool it down? I also noticed that when I restarted the computer the color quality switched to 16 bit instead of 32! My computer specs are below:

PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI NVIDIA SLI Certified

CORSAIR Dominator 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)

Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz LGA 775 65W

ASUS EAH4870 DK/HTDI/1GD5 Radeon HD 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5

GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Please help!

 

[stalni]

first check that it is your temps that are too hot, use speed fan or hwmointor. otherwise you could dust off your heatsinks on your processor, graphics card any heat sink you can finde that is dusty, I would try dusting off the componets first if that does not work, just take off the side panal on your cabinet, the you could by fans.

 

[daw123]

The obvious question is what are your temps at idle and more importantly at load?

Run Prime95 or another stress testing program at the same time as Coretemp to find the CPU load temps.

 

[dfuze]

I've had good luck using Everest Home Edition to monitor my temps.

 

[eli2k]

This might or might not be relevant, but I had a problem with L4D where the game would constantly freeze some 15min into the game (forgot the details of how it was when it froze). Some places online said there was some issue with dual core processors, and running the command mat_que_mode 0 in the console fixes it (fixed it for me, though).