Cold Snap

[BentonGrey]

My friends, I need your technical wisdom.  I must admit, I'm more than a little stressed out here.  I've just started putting my computer back together after a complete wipe, and all of a sudden I'm having problems that look like hardware failure.  That just doesn't seem fair while I'm struggling with software problems aplenty.  Basically, I'm getting hard freezes during games.  While trying to play Warhammer: Dawn of War with a distant friend, I experienced two consecutive hard freezes after five to ten minutes of gameplay.  After each of these, my computer would not restart and I had to turn it off and on again, rebooting with "last settings that worked."  I updated my videocard drivers and restarted again, tested a 15 minute solo game, and then gave it one more shot with my friend only to meet the same failure.  Yet, this time the computer rebooted alright.  I gave up on DoW, and my friend said that the videocard might be overheating.  I decided to test that with CO, played for somewhere between five and ten minutes once more, and experienced another hard freeze, once again rebooting without trouble.  The card was warm, but not what I would really call "hot."  Perhaps I'm overestimating its ability to deal with heat.  There is no fan on the card, so we aren't dealing with a fan failure.  My friend also indicated that a faulty power supply could cause similar symptoms, but I have no idea how to test for that.  I just installed all of this stuff last year, it is still relatively new.  Do y'all have any advice for how I should go about troubleshooting this?  I have an old video card, so I suppose I can simply plug that in there and see if I get any better results.

[GogglesPizanno]

I upgraded my video card a while back, and it was one of the newer ones that required extra power, that was enough to tip the scales on my older power supply and I experienced similar issues - reverting back to my older lower power card fixed the problem till i got a new machine.

Also what brand is the video card. the card I had was Nvidia and when it froze, it just locked the system up. My older ATI card had a setting called like VPU recover, which sensed when the card locked up and reset the driver. The machine would freeze for several seconds but reset itself. So if your card is ATI, you might look for that setting and turn it on to try and diagnose if its the card that crapping out.

But if i had to guess, the symptoms sound like a power problem of some kind.

One thing you can try is to unplug any extra drives and peripherals you might have that aren't totally necessary and try playing the games again to see if that fixes it. By reducing the power consumption as much as you can it might help to confirm that it has something to do with that.

[BentonGrey]

Hmm...that does sound very similar to my issue Goggles, and I've got an Nvidia Geforce 8600, too.  What I don't understand is that this setup has run without problems for a year, so I don't get why it is just now doing this.  I wonder if the new drivers cause it to suck up more juice or something. 

Unhooking peripherals is a good idea, as I do have my gamepad hooked to my system as well, and that thing is powered through its connection.  Still, I had that set up before for CO, and it seemed to work fine.  That's odd.

[BentonGrey]

I'm beginning to wonder if it might be the CPU overheating.  Doing a little testing today, I found that unplugging my peripherals MAY have bought me a little more time before I froze, but not that much.  I checked my CPU's temperature during start up, and it was running at 60 and climbing steadily (by checking BIOS).  I turned it off before it got to 70, somewhere around 67.  This was after having been off for a few minutes, but before that it had been on for a few days steadily.  From what I've found online, that seems like it is too high.  All fans in the case are running.  What should I do?

:EDIT: On advice from a friend, I'm going to replace my heatsink as a first step.  Unfortunately, as I'm leaving for home tomorrow, that will have to wait until I get back.