Right...

My old PC that Nathan now owns still has the crashing problem it had when I had.

I changed the psu as I though that may have been the problem, also I bought another case and added extra system fans to help the cooling, still no joy.

The reason Nath dont play BF is because of overheating and crashing, any ideas of what else it could be?

XP2600
Radeon9700
1gb of mixed cheapo ram.

He doesnt even have to be gaming some nights, he could be net browsing and boom just dies.

Most likely mobo, then maybe ram, then gfx card.

It's a tough one, try running with just one stick on ram, if it's still the same, try running with the other one.

Try loosening your ram timings, eg. raise cas latency to 2.5 or 3

Hopefully that will rule out the ram

whats the actual symptoms? random crashing? crashing how - lock ups? bsod?

Just dies.

Shuts down, laffs and then ****s off

Basically not a shut down but more like a power failure.

i take it you have checked your temperatures? do this 1st cos u can do it without leaving ur chair.

also if your cpu is overheating prolly extra system fans might not help. the probe is normally right under the heatsink. it could also be a loose cpu fan or badly seated cpu.

if it were me i would lay it out on a table without a case and take all the components out. blow out all the slots and clean the contacts on all the cards + memory. i would also remove the cpu and heatsink clean off all the gunk and put some new paste on it.

99% of all the pcs i look at have way to much arctic silver which can also cause overheats. this stuff is designed to fill in the imprefections in the metal surface of the sink so should be thinner than wafer thin layer. a huge splodge of silver with some nice oxidation could be your problem.

once all clean and dandy turn it on out of the case. if its still ****ed then i would say ur shafted unless u can afford to replace parts ad hoc for testing purposes or put ur cpu/ram/mobo in another pc.

if it now works put it back in the case and if problem reoccurs its deffo heat related.

another quick thing you could try is just take the case sides off and see if u still have the same problem.

like mani said could be the mobo is shafted or a duff stick of ram or even a ****ered cpu. running on 1 stick at a time is also a good idea.

Opened up the PC and found it had 1.2gb ram, left the 2x512 in there and took the 256 out.

2 hours and so far so good.

I will strip the pc this weekend if problem persists.

5 hours now

Bout to try css

*BOOM*

lol seems all is well....

i would have added the harddrive to the list of possaible overheating components :// mine used to overheat all the time

Quote: Maz
lol seems all is well....

i would have added the harddrive to the list of possaible overheating components :// mine used to overheat all the time

I had a similar issue about a week ago, one my Maxtor Serial ATA drives decided to start making a clicking noise, and began locking explorer. I took the side off, stuck a spare case fan next to it which enabled me to retrieve the files I wanted to save (as I was expecting it to die completely) then had a re-arrange of the drives in the machine and lo & behold the problem has gone away, without adding any extra cooling.

Clicking hard drives are scary, I'd still be worried about it tbh.

yeah sounds like knackard bearings!

Stripped the PC down tonight and put some more heatsink on and gave it a good clean out.

cpu is running 5c lower and so far stable.

cool..