newfound quiet-freak ;)

[npc4]

Recently I've been replacing all my noisy computer stuff with quieter hardware:

Enermax whisper PS ~430 watts ($100 for a power supply!)
Enermax 80mm adjustable fan for my Thermalright AX-7
I even went as far as to buy a quiet Seagate Barracuda (WDs were loud)

My current CPU temperatures are around 46C idle and 50/51C under load. The case temperature at the moment is 49C (with my case open). The temperatures were a bit lower back in winter... Now, am I right in saying my CPU temperature should not be causing any unstability in my system? Occasionally I find that my games freeze, the most recent one being Dungeon Siege. I was wondering since I just ordered a Vantec stealth 80mm fan for my CPU, which should supposedly be about the same airflow as my current fan setting. Anyone else running an AMD CPU with a quieter, lower CFM fan like a Vantec or Papst?

The only other thing I can think of that would cause this is my video card. It's an old Geforce 2 MX400, and it only has a heatsink on it. I can touch the heatsink on my CPU and it's quite cool, but my video card's heatsink is unbearably hot to the touch. The thing is, why was it shipped like this if it's unstable? Lately I've been running at higher resolutions (new LCD), so I could be straining it more.

Is it possible running with my case open is reducing airflow to the cards in my computer? BTW, I have no other fans in my computer other than my PSU and CPU fan. Sorry about so many questions, answering even just one would help a lot 🙂

 

[NewSc2]

I think all GeForce2 MX 400's are shipped with a passive heatsink.

I was running 1600X1200 on it on a 21" monitor for my desktop, and played Warcraft 3 on it and everything else on pretty high settings, and my gf2 mx400 wasn't the cause of my war3 lockups (I recently bought a GF3).

It might be possible that something else is freezing your games, I doubt anything overheating would cause just a program to freeze. For me, after I took out a stick of memory, my war3 stopped its random crashes (however, 256MB of SDRAM makes for a slower computer 🙁)

Hope this helped

 

[npc4]

Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify, it's not just the program that freezes. Various programs would freeze and take the computer with it, meaning I couldn't do anything like alt-tab or ctrl-alt-del to get out.

 

[NewSc2]

couple questions:

what OS are you running? (i've never had a full freeze in WinXPPro or Win2Kpro, but it happened often in Win98 and ME =\)
when was the last time you reformatted your computer? (usually i do this about 3-4 times a year to clean out everything)

also try scanning for viruses. when war3 froze for me it was just a fatal error and it pissed me off immensely (15-20 losses just cuz of bad memory). usually temporary heat isn't the cause of crashes for me, it's usually heat over a long period of time that's caused certain parts of my computer to wear out, so i don't think isolating the problem as a certain part and dealing with extra cooling would solve the problem.

of course i'm a relative newb when it comes to computers so maybe other people in the forums can help you out. welcome to the AT forums and say hello to a huge time hole (i spend at least an hour just browsing the forums daily 😱)

 

[npc4]

I'm running a clean install of WinXP home edition. I usually don't get full system freezes like that from games like Counter-strike that freeze (I can just kill it from the task manager). I'm trying to figure out what's making my whole PC freeze though... unfortunately I don't have any extra memory to switch mine with. I guess I'll try some system stressing with Sandra, maybe that'll turn up something.