Help: PC Shut Down when playing 3D games [Archive]

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Matt

11-08-2006, 08:08 PM

Hi

This is a problem that rears its ugly head every now and again, and I'd love to find out what the cause might be.

The problem:

When playing 3D intensive games like Battlefield 2 my PC occasionally shuts down, not even a blue screen crash, it just totally powers down and I have to switch it off at the back for a about 30 secs before I can power up again.

When I restart there is no error message or anything in the System Log to help with debugging.

At first this happened only in Battlefield 2, and I thought it might have been heat related, so I tried it with the case side off.

This seemed to help as I've not had anymore issues with BF2.

Recently I bought GTA: 3 and GTA: Vice City for PC (they were on sale) and I loved playing them on the PlayStation. Now these games I would say are less intensive than BF2, but Vice City does the same thing within a few minutes of playing - everytime, and this is with the case side off.

Things I've tried:

Updating to the latest nVidia ForeWare drivers

Cleaning out the GFX card fan with compressed air (actually needed that)

Lowering the resolution in the game

Removing 1GB RAM (2 x 512MB) leaving the original 1GB RAM I had when I bought my PC

I've run out of ideas now.

My system specs are:

Asus P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard
(875P Northbridge with ICH5R Southbridge)

Intel Pentium 4 3.4Ghz Retail 512k (478) 800 HT
Zalman Silent 7000 Cu Cooler

2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 Dual Channel Premier Series (2.5-3-3-7)
PN: OCZ4001024PCC-K

2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel Platinum Edition (2-3-2-5)
PN: OCZ4001024ELDCPE-K

Gainward Ultra 2600 GeForce 6800 Ultra Graphics Card
AGP 8x (256MB)
ForceWare Driver: v93.71

Nexux NX-5000 500w ATX PSU

Windows XP Professional OEM (2002 Sp2)

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

Cheers
Matt

coremi

11-08-2006, 09:32 PM

u have a hardware problem, i'll start with the power supply, and then with the video card. I do think the video card is the problem, it is heating very much and it shuts down to prevent damage. Also the CPU if gets hot will shut down. Memory doesn't shut down the computer, it crashes it or restart it. Change the video card for test only.

connerh

11-08-2006, 09:41 PM

As coremi said, it's either the card or the PSU. To test for the card, replace the card you have with another one and go back to gaming, though make sure that it's about as taxing as the other card was. If your system doesn't reset, replace the card, and trying running your computer off of a different power supply. If it still crashes after those two tests, then I'd recommend getting a program to monitor your system specs and writes them to log files. Keep this program running in the background during the game to see if your CPU heat is climbing too high.
Also, this just occured to me, you may want to run memtest86 for a few hours, just to make sure it isn't your ram. I had a bad stick when I built this computer and it would hardcrash periodically and wouldn't reboot unless I either let it sit and let it workout the charge or flipped the switch on the back.

coremi

11-08-2006, 09:53 PM

i've had issues with 6800 Ultra card, they were heating too much and aftre a while they started going down. Usual problems, aftre 45 min of gaming white dots appearing on screen, most funny was in Doom 3 after killing a monster, the body will start flying in the room hitting the wall like some super power punishing the monster for not being bad enough :). Change the video card, also make sure the air flow works.

StereoMike

11-09-2006, 04:08 AM

First try to dust off the fans. Buy a can of compressed air and blast the dust off the heatsinks and fanblades. This worked wonders on my laptop, tends to shut down like your machine, now it works without probs.

Mike

Matt

11-09-2006, 05:00 AM

I'll stick my previous 400w Nexus PSU in and see what gives, unfortunately I don't have a spare GFX card to test.

But I think I had this issue in BF2 with the old PSU, which is why I bought a 500w PSU, which would lead me to believe it's the 6800 ULTRA.

The GPU core regularly runs at around 60 degrees C, but has a shutdown threshold of 115 degree C, and it's never been anywhere near that from I can gather!

Stooch

11-09-2006, 05:19 AM

i highly recommend seasonic. highest efficiency psu for the money and by far the best design. i used to research my stuff pretty hardcore and i saw the internals of all the leading brand PSUs on the market, the seasonic brand has by far the most efficient and cleanest PCB and heatsink layout, coupled with their insane efficiency and silent operation - makes these a must have. Most problems with shutting down are caused either by PSU or overheating.

kopperdrake

11-09-2006, 05:57 AM

If your card is getting too hot, maybe invest in a better fan on the card than the default one. My dad's old GeForce had heating issues so I bought a decent fan for about £20 and it cured the problem :)

MiniFireDragon

11-09-2006, 09:02 AM

It sounds like a hardware failure occuring. The fact that you need to power off in the back for 30 seconds is not a good thing. I would replace the power suplly 1st. I have seen video cards overheat before. U'd know it when your card overheats. Your frame rate drops in the games and video artifacts start to develop. Then it freezes.

But, if you think it is your video card overheating, take a fan and blow it into the side of the computer. Besure the aire flow hits the video card directly. My brother actually glued a case fan onto the videocard to top it from overheating. Besides, if it was overheating 30 seconds isn't long enough to cool something down.

zapper1998

11-09-2006, 09:18 AM

Can you restart and go into the BIOS and see what temp the cpu's are running, in the hardware monitor part of the bios...

Matter of fact i need a couple of new cpu fan myself, 3 yrs sense i bought them and there noisy as heck...

Jim_C

11-09-2006, 09:21 AM

hi Matt,

I have a 6800 Ultra AGP also. I also get an occasional software crash when hardcore gaming. Except for me the game just disappears and poof back to desktop.

I have not really done any troubleshooting on it since it is fairly random and rare and the sysytem is very very rock solid for everything else I do. All my editing/media apps are on that machine but a different boot up.

Not a lot of help, but just some info from a fellow 6800 user.

If you have a spare bill, go get a new card at Best Buy, open and use carefully to test, then return it.

Matt

11-09-2006, 07:24 PM

Matt

11-09-2006, 07:44 PM

Okay, right on cue Vice City shut down my PC after about 5-10mins of playing.

As quick as I could I logged these temperatures:

CPU: 41°C
Motherboard: 30°C
GPU: 55°C (Had to wait for XP to load to find this out, so maybe slightly higher)
GFX card Ambient: 38°C

None of these seem dangerously high to me, what do you think?

I would say this could just be an incompatitbility between Vice City and the 6800 ULTRA, but I've had this happen in BF2 too, not the last time I played, but a while ago.

Interestingly, I played the demo of Company of Heroes for a good hour or two the other night and that was fine. So was Condemed: Criminal Origins (last time I played it, again for over an hour).

So, not sure what to think. Maybe these games are doing something slightly different than the others that causes them to shut my PC down? But surely they would just crash, or at worst blue screen, not shut the PC down cold!

KorbenD

11-09-2006, 07:49 PM

Matt

11-09-2006, 09:03 PM

The PSU is very well built, despite being 500w it delivers clean power, check this independent review:

http://www.pro-clockers.com/reviews.php?id=66

So I hope it's not that, as I only bought it last year!

Matt

11-09-2006, 09:49 PM

http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/

Download the program from that site and run it. You can have it running in a window while keeping the temperature monitors up for your CPU and video card.

Nice little program that!

With all the settings on max with the most complex model (skull) I left it going for a while and the GPU never went over 80°C

It also didn't crash.

Been thinking about the RAM in my system too, I've left my PC rendering overnight on huge scenes many times now, and I've never had it crash.

Karmacop

11-09-2006, 10:06 PM

I had a similar problem once. I ended up opening the case to clean out the dust, hoping that would fix it. Luckily after opening the case I realised some of the capacitors on the motherboard were leaking. So even though when running normally the heat was fine, as soon as I played a game it'd overheat the system. And seemingly so much heat had built up in the case that it caused the capacitors to rupture. So, do you have a small case? If not it might be an idea to open it up anyway and make sure you're not doing any damage.

Ivan D. Young

11-10-2006, 02:53 AM

It is not much consolation, but the 6800 series video cards are really fast but notoriously hot running. you might want to think about replacing that card with something that does not generate as much heat. Also that particular card will draw more power as it gets too hot, physics and all that. That card can probably be replaced with a slightly faster card that has had a die shrinkage and get much lower ambient heat and power usage.

DiedonD

11-10-2006, 03:23 AM

Perhaps you should try a different game. It seems outer unnatural forces are against you playing that game. I recommend highly Onimusha's, all of the 4 epizodes, commandoss all eps, and Metal gear all eps. Those are my favorite, and I never had any problems playing them, even with a far more lower PC characteristics than yours.

Matt

11-10-2006, 07:17 PM

Interesting, I've just tried GTA3 and it seems fine, maybe this is something to do with Vice City? Although BF2 did shut down my PC on occasions too.

Very odd, maybe they're using some of the graphic cards features in an inappropriate way.

roboanarchy

11-10-2006, 09:24 PM

Check your bios for a setting called PEG link mode, and set it to normal or slow.