Computer shuts down under load/gaming - tried most fixes

[Brainonska511]

double post

 

[Michael_H]

My slot-switching idea did not seem to do the trick. I put the graphics card in the second PCIe slot and started up JC2. I thought I noticed a _small_ difference, but rather than wonder about it I remembered that game has a built in benchmarking tool. After the first pass I saw that the settings were not all on high, turned them up, and on the next pass of the benchmarking tool it crashed.

So that's with the PCIe card in the second slot (freeing up surface area of the chipset) as well as the side off of the case and a boxfan blowing into the case. Hrm.

Two bad video cards in a row??

 

[sygyzy]

Please try to get a $15-20 aftermarket cooler for your card and install it properly. I know it sucks to spend extra dough but $15 sure beats buying a new graphics card plus even if that's not the culprit, it's not going to hurt your GPU. It'll be like an upgrade.

 

[Michael_H]

I guess I can mark this one as SOLVED, though I never did end up finding the real issue. After a long, long time and a lot of frustration, I threw up my hands and started over in the following manner:

-RMA'd motherboard again
-RMA'd GPU again
-New case (Antec 300 Illusion)
-New hard drive (Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB)

Building it all again with the above parts got around whatever gremlins were giving me issues, and the computer is running fine except for one little startup hiccup (which I made a separate thread about).

I know it's not a great model for troubleshooting something, but at a certain point I felt like I needed to start over. Thanks to everyone that posted in this thread and helped.