More Awesome Than You!

I started having issues with my games crashing a day or two ago.  And today it's getting noticeably worse.

It all started out with WoW crashing to the desktop.  I soon got fed up with it and started playing TS2.  That's when I noticed some weird red splotches in the neighborhood loading screen.  After a few more minutes of play the game crashed.  After I loaded it up again it crashed a second time and made the computer reboot.  So this has me suspecting the video card is overheating.

The video card in question is an ATI Sapphire X1950 Pro 512mb.  It's a year old and has the factory fan and heat sink.  No after market cooling.  I haven't had the case off in a while so I'm about to take it off and go in with a can of compressed air.  I imagine it looks pretty nasty in there since I smoke around the computer.  I'll leave the case off and see if things work better.

As far as system details go I'm running Windows XP SP2 with 4 gigs of RAM.  The PSU is 700W.  And it's as old at the video card because I bought both of them at the same time.

Are there any easy ways to single out an overheating video card and the culprit?  And are there any other hardware or software problems that could cause this?

At Best Buy's Geek Squad, they had 2 sets of pictures of a pc interior. The pc was loaded with, what looked like, from a long-haired dog. One picture showed a hand with a fist full of hair that was pulled out. All the opennings and fans were blocked and filled. The most amazing thing was the dead bug that lay at the bottom with its little feet up. Yet, I understand, the pc still worked.

Sorry Dark Trepie, I don't know enough to comment on your question. Just the the above quote brought those pictures to mind.

Smoking at your computer is bad, because all the crud you blow out from your cigarettes is sucked into the computer and plasters itself over the boards, eventually shorting something out.

I had a similar issue that not only caused those types of issues but caused pixels to show up on my screens.  It got so bad that I couldn't even play my computer games that had major graphics.  I have an SLI system with two graphics cards and found out one was bad.  Most likely from what you describe its the graphic card.  However, if your system starts to shut off on its own in addition to your issues it could be either your CPU or Power supply have gone bad which causes some of the same issues you state.

When power supplies go bad it causes all sorts of weird stuff, we know since we have had 3 of them after years of use go bad.  If you have another computer in the house the graphics card will work on test it there to see if the computer is having the same issues if it is not then that is not the issue and it could be some of the others I stated.  If you have a spare graphics card you could simply replace the current one and see if its still happening as well.  With 6 computers in my house its easy for us to narrow things down in those cases.   If you have other strange issues let me know Ill have my husband look at this and see if he knows a fix or work around.

Posted by: J. M. Pescado

Smoking at your computer is bad, because all the crud you blow out from your cigarettes is sucked into the computer and plasters itself over the boards, eventually shorting something out.

My husband smokes but not next to the PC or in the house so he doesn't get more issues than he needs.

Very true. My own experience is that smoking leaves a sticky tar residue all over the interior. Makes sucked in stuff more likely to stick on fans, etc.

Update:  Looks like its not an overheating issue at all.  I just took a friend's advice and ran memtest.  Seems as though I have bad RAMz.  :(

Now I get to do the "Swap out each RAM chip and boot computer to see which one is the culprit" dance.  Such fun!

Update 2:  And bad RAMz stick has been rooted out.  Down from four gigs to three gigs.  I guess that means fewer twinz.  :P