Vista - Games constantly crashing

I bought a new system on Friday and got it home all excited and ready to use. Installed a couple of my games and they hard lock the system after about 1-2 minutes of play (cannot alt+ctrl+del, alt+tab or anything but reset the machine). This happens in COD4, Crysis, Bioshock and NFS:Pro Street.

I have installed the latest DirectX:June update, and tried it with 175.70, 175.16 and 177.41 drivers. Turned off Firewall, AV before playing the game. The system I have is an E8400, 4GB Corsair 6400 memory, Galaxy 8800GT (My GPU-Z pic is below), Gigabyte EP45-DSL3 M/Board. I'm also running Home Premium x64 edition that has already come with SP1 installed. PC is not overheating as it happily stays around 35-45 before it crashes. Nothing is OCed and everything is at its default settings.

Any other assistance would be great. I knew I avoided Nvidia for 6 years for a reason :\

When you say bought, you mean you actually purchased the computer pre-built, right? And is it always a few minutes after you start the games or does it seem random?

Sort of, I chose all the parts I wanted in the PC and the place where I bought it from built it. I'm not all that confident in doing it myself (been out of hardware for awhile now).

The game always crashes after a few minutes of play (essentially the same time passes in the game before it hangs). I could repeat it in Crysis as it always crashed in roughly the same spot each time after running to it. It also hung in Crysis not far into the intro if I didn't skip it (Where the lady archeologist is speaking).

There's got to be some logical explanation for why it would run then crash. I ran the graphics test 3dMark Advantage (for the PC with my specs, the first few tests only ran at 5-10 FPS whereas I would have expected better performance). Could this point to possible compatibility issues with driver and system/card?

Anyone know of some very stable drivers that I could use?

(sorry about delayed reply, different time zones and the fact I work random hours of the day don't help )

To me it almost sounds like your computer is overheating or you may not have a good Power Supply installed. What brand and how many watts is your PSU? Did the people who built your computer overclock your processor? Download and install Everest Ultimate Edition - Free software downloads and reviews - CNET Download.com and run a stress test on your computer for about 30 minutes to an hour and let us know the temperatures.

Thanks for getting back to me and I'm going to try Everest now but in the meantime the PSU is: EarthWatts 500 Watt power supply (80 PLUS® certified) if that helps. Will post again once Everest is finished. The one thing I don't understand is that there are 2 PCIE plugs going directly from the PSU into the Graphics card. http://www.antec.com/connectors.php?...137&SetZone=en has the picture of the PCIE connectors.

For extra information, the graphics card supports PCIE2.0 and the motherboard (EP45-DSL3) is PCIE2.0 too. Would having PCIE1 power cables going into PCIE2.0 graphics make a difference? i.e. voltage isn't enough or too much?

Here's the results of the Everest test:
Not much happened for about 15 minutes and the system would have normally crashed after a few minutes. The reason why the tick boxes were empty then was due to me testing out what each does. Will try searching for a graphics stress tester now though 3d Advantage would do a good job of testing it.

Some graphics cards do use two power connectors. If it was installed incorrectly you would know about it.

Sounds like it is graphics or memory related.
Check the drivers that came with the computer.
Some times reverting back to the origanal drivers by the manufacterer will help.

I believe that it could be a heat issue afterall. I've just run a program called Video Card Stability Tester with Everest monitoring the GPU and GPU memory heat and it hard locks the system when the GPU hits 64 degrees (Celsius or 147F) and GPU memory hits 55 Degrees (Celsius or 131F). Does these sound like too hot temps for a graphics card?

My friend's PC had similar cooling issues with his old P4 3GHZ but we later found out that HP had installed a TV card directly in front of the Graphic's heatsink/fan setup which meant that the heat had nowhere to go, the fan promptly melted and the PC rebooted.

I really appreciate everyones help on this matter so far. If this is the case then it looks like I will need to get new cooler installed on the 8800GT. It's pretty pathetic that a brand new semi-top of the range card can't cool itself properly (stupid 5c fans).


It seems to spike quite quickly and this was ~1.5 minutes and the program didn't even get a chance to complete its 3 minute benchmark.

The galaxy version of the card does get hot so it is not that problem. A quick google are reporting temps up to 75c

Thanks for doing that Roy.

Just finished a full memtest and it found nothing wrong. Going to take it back to the place that assembled it and make it their problem.

I have 2 EVGA 8800gt's and they IDLE around 89C. Yeah I know, sounds high but whatever. They drop abit when I open the door, my case is a cosmos?, but not that much. If that's your temps, then I doubt it's overheating. I would go with the driver or memory problem. There's a few different things you can try to narrow it down.

1. Take the side panel off for better airflow, allowing you to check for overheating.

2.Take all your ram out and start with one stick, then keep adding until it locks up. If it does it on the first one, try a different one. If it does the same thing on the next one, then it's probably not the ram. You could try another one to be safe.

Make sure you have all the latest drivers to. And do me a favor, that is if you haven't takin it back yet, and let the everest stress test run on the cpu only for about 8 to 10 hours. When you go to bed. I'm not positive on this but it does sound like the problem I had a few months back. But your specs are different than mine. That's why I'm wondering.