Pc restarts while playing games

J

jaguarkid

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Hey guys, hope someone can help me.

About a week ago my pc started restarting itself when i play games. What happens is, after about an hour a play windows displays a blue error screen then automatically restarts itself. The error message isnt displayed long enough for me to read the error message.

Im currently running an AMD athlon64x2 5200, 9600gt 2 gig ram 320 gig hard drive and a 400wht psu. Im also running XP 32bit sp3

I have formatted my pc, reinstalled drivers and updated windows before installing any games.

Hope someone can help me, as my beer is finished and i now have a headache trying to figure this out :P
 
Could be a whole bunch of things, but if it only reboots when in games, and only after a while, it might be the CPU overheating. The next time it reboots, goto the BIOS menu and see if you can find where you can monitor the temperature. That'll show you if you are getting hot or not.
 
I think your PSU is the problem. The 96GT should have a minimum of about 460 Watts if I remember correctly. It could be that your PSU's capacitors have started declining in health due to age which will decrease the power it's able to output, thus restarting your PC due to unstable voltages... Unless I'm going completely batty and all of this is actually incorrect. For the meantime, check your CPU's temp and monitor it constantly and try find another power supply.
 
Control panel ,system , Advance options go to Startup and recovery tick automatic restart to be off.

This should help you see the bsod.
 
This usually happens because of overheating or if your power supply can't handle the graphics card. I had a problem with the CPU overheating but the PC would switch off, not reboot. When overclocking my old graphics card games would sometimes freeze and then reboot when it got too hot.
 
Ok i checked the cpu temp, its a constant 41, my case has 4 120 mm fans and the case is well ventilated. The power supply is kinda old i think its about 3 years old now. The GPU is about 6 months old, bought it in march, it is a factory overclocked version :-/ I also got the case about 3 months ago, you guys think the combination of a more power consuming case and graphics card pushed the PSU over its limits?
 
Try underclocking your graphics card and see if that makes a difference. Your gfx card is either overheating due to a manufacturing error or its the PSU. My money is on the PSU. I've heard of this problem quite a few times because of PSUs.
 
basically wat every1 else said - gonna be sumthing overheating or not enuff power coming from ur PSU.
 
My bet is on the PSU because you said it's 3 years old which means the capacitors will have aged a lot and it will not be outputting at 400W anymore so obviously at some point it just clicked and it just can't provide enough power. I've seen this classic example with many people's computers that have been sent in.
 
Easy way to check the errors, in xp just search for event viewer and browse through all the error events occured, but i agree with stroebs its the PSU.
 
stroebs said:
My bet is on the PSU because you said it's 3 years old which means the capacitors will have aged a lot and it will not be outputting at 400W anymore so obviously at some point it just clicked and it just can't provide enough power. I've seen this classic example with many people's computers that have been sent in.
Click to expand...

yeah, as the PSU warms up due to the current flowing through it, it loses capacitance, the watts it can supply drops, then the graphics card is starved, and you get bsod because the graphics runs an error.

I suggest you get a new PSU pronto, we don't want anything getting busted.
 
Thanks guys! Will have my PCU replaced monday and will inform you of the results.
 
Wait u said a blue screen? Then a restart?

With PSU, most time it just restarts by without a bluescreen indicating a loss of power.

With a bluescreen it could be ram, cpu, mobo anything.

If u can borrow a friend's psu to test first, otherwise u'll just be waiting money. Also did you see what the blue screen show after u disabled automatic restart? Googling the error can sometimes show u whats the problem.
 
stroebs said:
I think your PSU is the problem. The 96GT should have a minimum of about 460 Watts if I remember correctly. It could be that your PSU's capacitors have started declining in health due to age which will decrease the power it's able to output, thus restarting your PC due to unstable voltages... Unless I'm going completely batty and all of this is actually incorrect. For the meantime, check your CPU's temp and monitor it constantly and try find another power supply.
Click to expand...

I also think it may be the psu, but its hard to get your hands on a cheap 400watt + psu
 
Blue screen could also be a memory dump...

That could be either the GFX card memory (due to lack of current from PSU) or a faulty RAM module or mismatched RAM modules (how many RAM modules do you have and are they all the same?)
 
"yeah, as the PSU warms up due to the current flowing through it, it loses capacitance, the watts it can supply drops"


"PSU because you said it's 3 years old which means the capacitors will have aged a lot and it will not be outputting at 400W anymore"

You blokes are real scary...:erm:
 
Yea it throws out a blue error screen, right after that the pc restarts, it did it again last night, after about an hour it restarted, then when it came back into windows, after about 5 minutes of playing team fortress it did it again. Oh yea another thing, one partition of my hard drive was fat32 i converted it into NTFS about 2 weeks ago, the trouble started more or less that time, could that be the problem? :-/
 
Oh yea and i have 2 ram modules, think they are both kingston both 1 gig ddr 2 800
 
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