PC restarting when playing games

[Nightmaresiege]

Hey everyone I recently built a PC with the following specs:

OCZ StealthXStream 600W PSU
ASUS P5Q-Green Mobo
Intel E8400 3.0Ghz
4GB OCZ Reaper DDR2 1066 RAM
Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 (Dual slot edition with the better heatsink/fan)
500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD
1 SATA DVD-RW

Note: The PC usually has about 2-5 USB devices attached to it at any given time.

The system has performed fine for the most part until recently. A day or two ago it started to reboot every time I start a game after about 3-5 mins of gameplay.

I realize the usual culprit in this type of scenario will be the PSU. My bios reports:

3.3v - 3.312V
5v - 5.064V
12v - 12.320v

I ran Orthos and SpeedFan for a while to see voltages, the 12v seems a little low:

Vcore - 1.06v
12v - 11.67v
AVcc - 3.34v

with very small fluctuations in the Vcore and AVcc values of about .03 or so.

I ran memtest and everything seemed to check out fine.

Other observations:

- Video card temps never exceed the 50s at load.

Thanks in advance everyone, if you need any more data, I'll be glad to run a whatever tests are necessary.

EDIT: I turned off auto reboot on Win XP and I dont get any errors, just a straight up reboot.

 

[HeXploiT]

Sounds like a psu issue to me as well. They tend to go out slowly sometimes.

 

[oynaz]

The video card might also be at fault.

 

[Sam25]

Originally posted by: oynaz
The video card might also be at fault.

I would agree. A similar problem happened to me while playing games on my ATI Radeon 9800 pro card a long time ago. Turned out the card was faulty.

 

[Nightmaresiege]

Thanks for the quick replies everyone. I'm going to replace the PSU tomorrow, hopefully this will fix the problem. I don't suppose there's any way to test the video card? Sure hope that's not it.

 

[Nightmaresiege]

Yeah looks like it may be my video card. I've replaced the PSU with a brand new Corsair 850W to no avail. Also, it seems to be getting more frequent, and I've visually noticed that card is the only component that shuts down. (or at least the fan does.) I'll go get a new card. However, do you guys have any other suggestions/theories?

 

[techie09]

Video card sounds like the culprit...

 

[Nightmaresiege]

Yeah I think so too. I'll replace it and report back.

 

[Denithor]

Run Furmark to test your GPU for stability. But since you're not seeing any excessive temps and no artifacts I kinda doubt it.

Since you've ruled out the PSU my next guess would be memory.

Run memtest86 overnight. If you have any errors RMA those sticks.

 

[Nightmaresiege]

Originally posted by: Denithor
Run Furmark to test your GPU for stability. But since you're not seeing any excessive temps and no artifacts I kinda doubt it.

Since you've ruled out the PSU my next guess would be memory.

Run memtest86 overnight. If you have any errors RMA those sticks.

I ran memtest but after about 15 minutes, the video card shut down (Or its fan does at least.) Needless to say, this causes me to have no video so I cant see any results. Before it happened though, I had no errors to speak of.

 

[Sam25]

Then it's the video card at fault. Get the card replaced for sure.

 

[rasczak]

Originally posted by: Sam25
Then it's the video card at fault. Get the card replaced for sure.

he ran memtest, and it failed after fifteen minutes. your solution is replacing the video card?

OP, try leaving one stick of ram in and running memtest again. This will help determine which memory stick is giving you problems. It sounds more like youre having memory issues to me. (I had this issue myself and ended up replacing my memory. Haven't had the issue since)

Also, before the computer shuts down, do you receive any BSOD errors?

 

[Sam25]

Originally posted by: rasczak

Originally posted by: Sam25
Then it's the video card at fault. Get the card replaced for sure.

he ran memtest, and it failed after fifteen minutes. your solution is replacing the video card?

OP, try leaving one stick of ram in and running memtest again. This will help determine which memory stick is giving you problems. It sounds more like youre having memory issues to me. (I had this issue myself and ended up replacing my memory. Haven't had the issue since)

Also, before the computer shuts down, do you receive any BSOD errors?

Oh shucks...missed that post regarding the Memtest! Sorry!

 

[Nightmaresiege]

Originally posted by: Sam25

Originally posted by: rasczak

Originally posted by: Sam25
Then it's the video card at fault. Get the card replaced for sure.

he ran memtest, and it failed after fifteen minutes. your solution is replacing the video card?

OP, try leaving one stick of ram in and running memtest again. This will help determine which memory stick is giving you problems. It sounds more like youre having memory issues to me. (I had this issue myself and ended up replacing my memory. Haven't had the issue since)

Also, before the computer shuts down, do you receive any BSOD errors?

Oh shucks...missed that post regarding the Memtest! Sorry!

Haha don't worry about it. I'm running the test on each individual stick now. Also afaik, no BSOD, just plain black.

 

[Nightmaresiege]

On testing the first stick the video shut down at around 17-20 minutes. Looking at the parts it just seems like the video card shuts down, everything else continues to run. No errors were present when this happened. The screen went straight to black. I'm testing stick two now.

 

[Nightmaresiege]

Stick 2 survived 1 pass of memtest.

EDIT: Specified what I meant by "survived"

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: rasczak
he ran memtest, and it failed after fifteen minutes. your solution is replacing the video card?

No, what he said is after 15 minutes he loses video feed. As in, black screen while everything else keeps running (except the video card fan).

It's highly unusual to lose video during memtest. And you really need to run memtest overnight (or at least for like 8 hours) before saying memory is fine. But it does sound more like GPU than RAM.

Were you able to run furmark?

 

[Nightmaresiege]

Originally posted by: Denithor

Originally posted by: rasczak
he ran memtest, and it failed after fifteen minutes. your solution is replacing the video card?

No, what he said is after 15 minutes he loses video feed. As in, black screen while everything else keeps running (except the video card fan).

It's highly unusual to lose video during memtest. And you really need to run memtest overnight (or at least for like 8 hours) before saying memory is fine. But it does sound more like GPU than RAM.

Were you able to run furmark?

Yes, this is what I meant. I apologize. And I don't think it ever stays up for 8hrs. Btw, thanks for all the help everyone. As for Furmark... i lost video in something like... 1 minute.

 

[Nightmaresiege]

Looks like it was the GPU all along. The problem stopped as soon as I swapped the card.