Yo lui,

My pc often crashes while playing a game. This only happens when playing certain games, such as rome total war, the movies and stubbs the zombie (DA game). I recently made a few adjustmens to my system, such as installing a new soundcard, two new memory sticks and I removed (quite unprofessional, involving two screwdrivers and stuff) my motherboard (K8T800) battery and re-inserted it after a few minutes. While playing rome: total war, this only happens in a battle. What's up whit that?

Did it crash a lot before you did the upgrades?

No, my pc didn't crash before the upgrades. I don't know what is causing this, seeing as I changed a lot. In the proces I had to remove and reinstall my video card as well so that may be the cause as well. I think my mobo is damaged or something. I also have two different brands of memory sticks (2gb total (1x 1gb, 2x512mb)), can that cause problems? O yeah, sometimes the games run smooth for a while, but they usually end up crashing.

Thanks in advance

Hey Anonymous,

Welcome to PCHF. We have a wonderful crew of techs here and I am sure that we will be able to narrow your suspects down until the culprit is found.

First of all. Have you checked your temps of your motherboard when you first bootup, and after you have been playing for a while. It sounds as if you may either have a heat problem or a PSU problem. If you had damaged your MOBO, you would be showing trouble all of the time, not just when the PC was under stress. (the extra work for extensive graphics such as battles is probably the key here)

Look forward to your reply,

TTFN

LGW

Well, at first the game only crashes in games. However, I recently rearranged my RAM because I thought that was the problem. Now my computer boots, but crashes (reboots, as if the power is turned of and on) when I start a certain game (kotor) and the same happens if I try to exit stubbs the zombie. This also happens if I try to terminate the process using taskmanager. Another time I managed to terminate the program by dividing the cpu pressure (I lowered stubbs.exe's priority and executed another program), so now I'm beginning to think the processor may be the source. This is weird, since I didn't change anything to my processor when upgrading. Does anybodyhave an idea as to what the cause can be?

Hi Anonymous,

did you check the temps? Have you tried a different PSU? It could be that you overloaded the one you have. It is also suspicious that switching RAM sticks caused additional problems. I would also suggest testing your memory with this utillity, Memtest

Looking forward to your answers,

TTFN

LGW

I don't think the temps (temperature?) is the problem here, it's on an acceptable level. I also haven't tried another PSU out yet, seeing as that worked fine before the upgrades and I didn't do anything with it. I only replaced my soundcard and insterted another RAM unit, but it should still be able to handle it. In fact, I also installed a system cooler in my system. I didn't have that before (I had the left side of my pc open for airflow). Memtest didn't show any errors and most of my games still work but some don't. I'm really beginning to think this is an hardware problem, either my mobo or my cpu. Also, booting windows somethimes doesn't work. I then turn off the power for a few seconds and turn it on again. I have changed the RAM sticks back to their original position but that doesn't change a thing. I've downloaded a driver update for my motherboard but it won't execute properly. In cmd-mode (DOS>) it keeps mentioning the file is too big for memory. Maybe I'll pull out the mobo battery again and see if it'll help.
Do you have an idea of what might fix this situation?