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My computer has been acting strangely for a long time but it seems to be getting worse. And I'm sick of it, so I turn to you guys for help. I think my comp has some kind of hardware problem.

It happens when I play games uninterrupted for an extended period of time. This can range from 1 hour to three hours at most. It most often occurs while playing MW2 but it's not specific to games since it's happened during Black Ops, Mass Effect 1 and 2 and others as well. What happens is that suddenly while playing, the screen freezes for one half to about ten seconds, then the computer simply shuts off the power and the monitor displays the same thing it would do as when you'd do a hard kill of the computer, namely displaying that the display port doesn't experience any signal output. Sometimes Skype convos I have on still work during the freezing period, but of course not anymore when the computer is shut off. I used the NVIDIA on-board temperature monitor to check the temperature right after rebooting; this is between 76 and 85 degrees. When idle, the temperature is 71 degrees. Fans all seem to be working fine.

I think it may be either the power supply or the monitor but I have no evidence for either and tbh the computer runs flawlessly when it doesn't do the weird crash thingy. I don't really feel like buying a whole new computer when it seems to me it's probably just one component that is malfunctioning.

I also tried a 3DMark test, during which the graphics tests got seemingly good results while the CPU tests ran at 0-1 FPS. I don't know if this is normal and I didn't understand anything of what the program told me after that, and I don't know if a faulty CPU means that I can run everything flawlessly except games for longer periods of time and then get a crash like that.

My specs are:
OS: win XP
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 @ 2.40 GHz
Mem: 2032 MB RAM
DX: 9.0c
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
Mem: 640 MB

Please halp!

You should probably buy some more RAM for starters.

Alias, on 29 Jan 2011, 14:42, said:

Well like I said, it works great for all games I want to play except it's unstable. I don't really want to actually upgrade it, just fix it.

Trust me, more memory can do wonders for stability.

Not to mention it costs about three beers these days to get a 2gb stick.

There are RAM USB sticks? Oo

Even so though, it's can't just be the memory, right? It was fine half a year ago or so, and I'm not playing games that are younger than that. The games I played then didn't experience this crashing...
Edited by Chyros, 29 January 2011 - 13:10.

Eh, I never said it was USB.

No, it's not likely to be just the memory but there is really no reason these days to have less than 4gb considering how cheap it is and it can contribute one of the greatest in terms of cost-to-performance.
Edited by Alias, 29 January 2011 - 13:24.

OK, I might take a look into those then.

Any other ideas what can be causing the crashes?

If you do end up getting memory and installing it, it would also probably be wise to give it a good clean inside.

Beyond that, I'm reasonably sure that it's probably just due to the age of the components you have, they're several years old now and computing parts do have really short operating lifetimes.

I had the same problem with my HP, and after a while the monitor wasn't detecting the PC at all, turns out the graphic card was screwed.
Also 71° on idle is over the normal temperature, I usually have between 50 and 60°, I only reach 70-80 when playing...

Try downloading the Ubuntu live disc and run a memtest86 test. If there is a problem with your RAM it will find it. There should be a similar test for CPUs but I am unsure ATM.

Might be a problem with the battery on the mobo...BIOS battery was it? Got a few hardware fanatics 'round me that says a bad BIOS battery can screw your PC up.

Any idea what PSU you have on it? As PSU gets older, it does sometimes lose their output level. If it is crap, then it is known that crap PSU likes to kill computer anyway.

Alias, on 29 Jan 2011, 16:19, said:

I do regularly clean the inside of my computer luckily enough, since it stands on a carpet regular maintenance is a must. And yeah, the thing is well over four years old, so it is getting a bit old . Like I said, it works excellently except for this one thing though.

CJ, on 29 Jan 2011, 16:19, said:

I'll download a GPU stress test tool and see what I can come up with then.

Scope, on 29 Jan 2011, 17:12, said:

I did a CPU stress test by Everest, which someone recommended to me. From 18 mins on I'm starting to experience mild to occasionally heavy stuttering which wasn't there before that time in the test.

These are the results I got:



Is this good and/or normal?

Destiny, on 29 Jan 2011, 18:48, said:

Well as you can see from the CPU test it looks like whatever battery is in the computer is dead. Could that be it?

ΓΛPTΘΓ, on 30 Jan 2011, 0:15, said:

Well, the CPU test picture I posted shows that the "voltages" seem well in order in terms of output level... I'll check what PSU it is tomorrow or something when I shut the power off the thing.

The CPU tests seem normal, and I don't think the BIOS battery is dead, or else your PC would have a hard time booting You could actually try removing it and reinserting it immediately.

And I still want to see those memtest results as it's pointing more and more to either a RAM problem or PSU. Or else it's just general aging of your system though it isn't THAT old. My 5 year old PC is working quite nicely for my brother and all I ever did was clean it and upgrade the graphics two years ago.

Yeah I'll get on that memtest as well, though not today as I'm falling asleep atm .

Here's the make of the PSU, btw:

I totally recommend you resit the CPU cooler if possible, I have a E6300 and it thermal throttle at around 70c (same core, different binned), with temperature averaging 80 something. There is certainly something wrong with the CPU.

PSU seems ok, but the CPU stress test result is terrible.

Test again with some real stress tester. Try Prime95 and OCCT. If they pass the normal test (doubt it will) try the Linpack test. Don't forget to run Everest (AIDA64) at the background to monitor the temperature.

The designed maximum running temperature for E6X00 is around 70c.

I ran Prime95 and OCCT CPU and PSU/GPU tests: the core temperature was pretty stable at 51 degrees and GPU quickly rose to 90 degrees and remained there. I didn't know if it was going to melt my GPU or not so I aborted it after ten minutes. I used Realtemp to monitor the temperature.

I don't mind running these tests but I don't know what to look for and when to abort it, and they all keep saying blahblah danger blahblah so I get the feeling that if I run one of those tests for the full hour and then the thing melts I will only know it worked sometime before this and not that that was the actual thing that malfunctioned in the first place. Can someone shed some light on this?

None of those test pose any problem to a computer. Any computer should pass it without problems. The warning is for people who have overclocked their hardware and not tested it fully.

Nothing in my computer is overclocked.