PC mystery crash

[AndyPants]

So I am in need of the wisdom of the darkside.

Since breaking my xbox I have reverted to playing PC games and have been frustrated with a (seemingly) random crash. During, what I can recall as semi GFX intensive times my PC will crash (stall with image on screen and then just loose video signal). It doesn't seem to just be a video crash. The sound stops along with the image and the screen just goes blank and my monitor power button starts blinking like it has no signal.

If I had more info on the issue I would post it and probably would have fixed it by now but this is just out of the blue while playing games or watching the occasional netflix instant viewing. Lately it has been more consistant, like not letting me play more than say 1 min of Spore (<- this is consistent w/o fail) Mind you the error happened before installing Spore.

Yes I have updated my drivers.

Yes I have updated DirectX.

I'm at a loss here. Any ideas guys?

[keyser28146]

What all games are we talking about here?

Are they all/any online?

Just curious... Have you tried removing/replacing ram?

The netflix thing makes it more interesting as well. Hmm.

[AndyPants]

OK so I've been searching around the internet and then posted here. Then my roommate came home and said something that confirmed a slight suspicion I had. Checked it out and found the cause.

A free forum sig to whoever guesses the cause of the issue (and no it wasn't a squirrel in my PC but almost as random)

[Brocman]

Well, if your playing Oblivion on the PC random crashes are to be expected as the game was not optimized for the PC. Whether you are running mods or not, you are going to be experiencing crashes. There are mods that lessen this phenomenon but overall you can't stop it from happening.

The most frequent is the CTD (crash to desktop) if this happens you need to restart your computer. If this happening with any other game. I wouldn't know. Perhaps Ratix would have some better insight on this problem since he is more experienced then I am when it comes to PCs

[AndyPants]

Well actually Oblivion runs best on PC but I guess there are crashes here and there as consoles tend to not crash in general. I'm not sure where you came up with "not optimized for PC" but I guess you only need to "optimize" ports of the game so yes you are correct in that respect that it was only optimized for the port to consoles. Great game BTW. Sucked on XBox though (at least the controls).

Well as no one wants to guess, it was the fan on my GFX card that came off its baring and wasn't spinning causing my card to overheat.

[RaTix]

Ha, I had that happen once. The fan had actually melted to the motor though. Random rebooting/crashing with GFX intensive situations usually means some kind of overheat, or misconfig.
I also had a problem where I had to redo my bios and forgot to switch from PCI to PCI-e. Thought that was the cause of an overheat for the longest time.
My suggestion to everyone, especially if your a smoker, to vacuum out your fans at least once a month. Even then, or not a smoker, your fans can overheat for various reasons and burn out. So keep an eye on them often.

free forum sig to whoever guesses the cause of the issue (and no it wasn't a squirrel in my PC but almost as random)

I claim shenanigans on your contest. You gave no time for me to answer as I was in practice. Not saying I would have guessed it first, but it would have been second or third.

[Brocman]

What I meant by not optimized for the PC is that the game requires a ridiculous amount of gpu power in order to look good. The official requirements for the game are pretty much bold face lies. And even when you do get a graphics card that is powerful enough to run the game it's recommended that you go into the ini file and turn off or down all kinds of stuff like shadows, grass, specular distance, blood decals, window reflections. On top of that you still need to install mods like operation optimization, low poly grass, and streamline.

[norm]

I would have won since that has happened to me. Fan failure is a bad thing. The same types of things will happen if you have onboard video FYI.

yep dust is a very bad thing

[Brocman]

LOL, that looks more like dryer lint, then dust.

[RaTix]

I think I found the keyboard that goes with that PC.

[LvDevilsFan]

Disturbing those pictures are... Reaver MUST clean his room!!