Hi,

I'm afraid I'm new to forums so if I stuff up or don't make sense please forgive me.

For a while now my PC has been shutting down instantly during, and only during, game play. It seems to happen on all games and sometimes after 1 min and sometimes over an hour. What happens is the PC just shuts down instantly and restarts. There is no error message from windows about it not being shut down properly.

I have had loads of opinions on the problem from overheating, driver problems, ram problems to not having enough power supply etc... Unfortunately nearly all of these have been eliminated by recent upgrades. I changed my 5900 Ultra for a Winfast 6600 GT graphics card, have bought a Thermaltake 550W PSU and have moved into a Tsunami Dream case. Temperature is def not a prob now, I have the latest drivers for the graphics card & power is there in abundance!

I'm desperate for help as I cannot seem to solve this problem and it is ruining my enjoyment of the great games about.

The other spec I guess you may need:
Winfast K7NCR18D Pro motherboard
Athlon 3000+
Windows XP with SP2 with all the updates available
1gb of Elixir Ram (PC came with 512mb but I have added another 512mb)

Only other bit of info that might help you. I downloaded and ran a 3D Mark test to give my new graphics card a run for its money and it was fine until the part where it came up with "CPU Testing" or something along those lines and it shutdown then. I have not yet managed to finish a 3D Mark test, that seems a pretty sure fire way of getting it to restart :-(

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated, sorry this is so long.

Cheers people,

Alex

I know you've already looked at this, but I have had the same issues and its been related to heat and the power supply. The next time your computer shuts down, see if there is a burnt smell in the vacinity. I would also check that the motherboard is seated correctly in the case and that its not shorting out intermittently.

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Hi Div,

Thanks for your reply. I ran 3D Mark again to get it to shutdown and it did. There is no burnt smell at all, I took the side panel off so I would have known if there was. The motherboard is well seated on proper mounts and isn't touching anything I think it shouldn't be :-(

Any other thoughts? My friend has suggested the Ram could be conflicting, although I had this problem before I added another 512mb, or the motherboard could be flawed? Anyone know of any problems with motherboard model?

Cheers again,

Alex

You could start taking out one component at a time. So, take out the 3.5 inch floppy (if you have one), the second hard drive (if you have one), the CD/DVD Rom drive, one stick of ram, etc and keep running the test.

Also get a utility like AIDA32 to check the cpu/motherboad temperature and the voltage values as you are testing.

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This might be bumping an old thread but I don't see anything fixing this problem. I had this problem and it took me about 3 weeks to find the problem. I don't know if your having the same problem but for me, it was a motherboard post grounding out the board.

An extra post under the board, that was touching the board itself. I guess that after the board heated up, it would flex alittle and out of no where "Poof" restart. Had no other warnings. This wasn't a system that I built myself and since I had no idea who installed the board, I had no one to throw the board at. I removed the board, removed the post, reinstalled the board, and have not had a problem since. I'm real lucky the board wasn't damaged.

Like I said, no idea if this is your situation but it happened to me. If it were me, I would check the following:

overheating
CPU (Swap with a known good and run that 3D test)
PS voltages (I've had this too, bad voltages from the PS can really do some squerlly stuff).
RAM
Cable Connections (Loose cables tend to haunt ya).
Bad or loose ground somewhere.

Just some ideas

I have personal had the problem twice. Both times it was realated to the Power Supply being bad. I would personal start there and check with a new power supply the motherboard can as SpudNuts said be grounding out and this too can cause a restart. I wouldn't think overheating would be a problem as the card would before it restarted the computer show signs of graphic corruption. The only other thing would be one of the boards in the Computer, I have seen bad Video Card do this as well.

Hope this helps

PCXGamer

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