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PC freezes randomly when playing games

B

bnf

Junior Member
I started having this problem a few weeks ago.
At first, games would occasionally stutter (picture freezes, keyboard and mouse don't respond, sound loops for a couple of seconds) and then commence normally.
Lately, the PC freezes completely and I have to hit the reset button to reboot it.

I can't make out any pattern at all, except that it only happens in games.

W40k: Dawn of War, Counter-Strike: Source, Warcraft 3, GTA:SA are some examples of the games that froze my PC.
Sometimes it happens when the game just started up, sometimes the game freezes after an hour.
I updated the sound drivers with the latest package on the realtek site (WDM_A373a) and I went through half a dozen gfx drivers (71.89 over 77.62 to 80.40, tried regular Nvidia and XG modded versions of most of them) but that didn't help at all.
Increased DDR voltage and replaced the PSU, didn't help.

My specs:

DFI LANParty UT nF4 Ultra-D - Nforce 6.39
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester with Zalman CNPS 7700 AlCu
1024Mb Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2
128MB Palit GeForce FX6600GT with Zalman VF700 AlCu - XG 80.40
BeQuiet Blackline 1.3 470W 24Pin

Bios temps at boot:
CPU 35°C
CHIP 45°C
Load temps are about 15°C higher each.

My system is running perfectly fine EXCEPT for those random freezes.
 
Display Properties > Settings tab > Advanced > Troubleshooting > Disable Write Combining.

Reboot and report results.

😀
 
When was the last time you blew the dust bunnies out of your CPU Heatsink Fan? Now that it's getting warmer out, CPUs are more sensitive to ambient air temp, and the Games are probably adding more heat to the CPU and the GPU, which is in turn putting more heat into the case.

Blow out the CPU Heatsink, and blow off all the fans (just put a pencil in the blades before blowing the fans, to keep the fans from going ballistic). See if that helps your instability problems.
 
Sounds like it could be an IRQ sharing issue, do you have any PCI cards in the system? Did you run a memory test to make sure it's not your RAM modules?
 
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