Computer Freezes and then Reboots...Vid Card Problem??

[manny1975]

Hey all, I built a computer for my father in law a while back and I put a 128mb pci express card in there. Anyhow, he got Call of Duty 4 and is telling me that that after playing hte game for a bit the compouter freezes and then reboots. Could this be due to the PCI express card being such a low mb? Would a 256 be better? I wish I could give you specs onthe computer but I do not have it in front of me. THe most I can tell you it has a

P4 3.2 Ghz
1 gig and a half DDR Ram memory
and of course the 128mb PCI express Vid Card

Any help or thoughts is appreciated!

Thanks!

[mjc]

Probably more likely to be overheating than a memory limit with video card. Especially if it hasn't been opened and cleaned since you built it.

The best thing to do, after the next freeze up, would be instead of rebooting to Windows, enter the BIOS and take a look at the temperatures.

[manny1975]

And what are the normal temperatures? And if it is a case of overheating (which sounds rare because it only happens when he plays the game, when he plays flight simulator X it doesnt happen)

[mjc]

Under 40 C is great, but anything below 50 is fine.

CoD4 is more intensive than FS-X so I'd expect it to generate more heat...

[manny1975]

OK it doesnt look like its the video card so it must be the temperature....how can I get it to not heat up as much?

[mjc]

Well, first step is make sure that the heatsink is nice and clean...that may require pulling the fan from it (I thought I had a clean heatsink, when I recently cleaned one...until I pulled the fan). The same goes for all the fans in the case (are there more than just the CPU heatsink and power supply?)...

Then after everything is clean, monitor the temps...there are several good programs mentioned in other heat related threads...if things are above 50 C then try running with the case open and small household/desk fan blowing into the case.

[manny1975]

Its running at 58C....im guessing thats the problem right there. Would a quick fix be buying a better CPU fan? Or adding some more of that white creamy stuff? I know when I built the computer the fan came with some and it was a $20 cpu fan so Im guessing its not good enough? BTW the specs are:

P$ 3.2 Ghz
160 gig HD
Nividia 6200 GForce Turbo Cache

[manny1975]

OK I got it down to 47 and then tried playing it, the game still froze up but did not reboot the computer. Any ideas or is it still the heating issue?

[IM back!]

my 8800gts 512 runs @ 62c. 47C is defenetly not the problem but the minimum requierment for Cod4 is a Nvidia GeForce 6600 or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, so you cant espect it to run on that 6200.

[Heartborne]

Manny, what kind of cpu do you have? That is a decent temperature for most CPUs when under load. My Q6600 idles around 40c and gets as high as 55c under load and it's totally fine.
Like IM back! says, It's most likely a limitation of your video card. It's unable to cope with the demands of the game and either gets too hot or pulls too much power from the psu causing a system crash.

This used to happen to me while playing Medeival 2: Total war or Hellgate: London on my old 6800 Gt with high settings. I should have known better, but the fact that the software RECOMMENDED those settings made me thing it was okay. It wasn't.

[Whyzman]

I would try taking the side panel off and letting a box fan gently blow on the innards...see if that resolves the problem...

[manny1975]

Hey Im not sure if this might have been the cause but when I took his computer home to see if maybe changing the fan might do it i noticed that the 1 gig stick of ram wasn't put in all the way. I checked the specs and it was only reading the 512. so I popped it in restarted and looked at the specs again. It read the 1 gig. I turned on COD4 and started to play it a bit. I let it sit and came back 30 min later figuring it should be hot enough and played for a bit more and it did not feeze up. So do you think that might have been the reason it was locking up when you play it since it was running on only 512 of ram?

[Heartborne]

Usually when a stick of RAM isn't seated properly the machine won't even boot, so this situation is atypical. But it looks like your computer is performing okay now, and that's good.

Typically, in a situation in which all of your system memory gets eaten up windows will pop up one of those lovely little boxes telling you you've got a memory allocation error. It won't cause the system to freeze or fail to boot.

Maybe that stick just came unseated when you moved the computer.

[manny1975]

I think you might be right Heartbone. It wasnt a memory problem and it probably came loose when I took the computer home. My father in law calle dme and told me he was playing for 40 min then boom, happened again, froz and rebooted. Then he was shopping for something on tiger direct and all of a sudden it froze and rebooted that was on a later day. So my guess again might be heat? The case really only has the power supply fan andthe regular cpu fan, no other fans on the case. the cpu fan is a cheap $2-0 coolmaster fan that I got at tiger direct. Do you think a more expensive fan for the cpu might do it? Maybe even drilling a spot for another fan on the case could help too?

[Whyzman]

Try a box fan gently blowing on the innards and see if that resolves the freeze-ups...