Crashing/Freezing during gameplay

[kojak22]

I've read some forums on this topic and they've all said something different so i decided to post one myself. Whenever i try to play a game for instance WoW i will get to play for 20 minutes or less. (this happens alot) I just installed oblivion and got to play for much longer but still, after about 45 min freezes or restarts. Now me and my brother have established that it is
1. Overheating of Video card or CPU
2. Bad RAM

I have even taken the side panal of my computer and put a fan next to it but still no luck. please help, thanks

[l337_GuY]

Download and post here your system temps with speedfan. Do it after 10 minutes of gaming or so.
Whats your pc specs?


http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

[kojak22]

here it is after about 10 min

videocard-AMD Athlon 64 AM2 3800
CPU-HIS X1600XT IceQ Dual DL-DVI 256/128MB GDDR3 PCIe
RAM- G.SKILL 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200)

[Jimmy420]

I don't know how high things get before its considered overheating, but them temps look pretty high to me...

[l337_GuY]

Nah they are all good.
Download memtest86 and give it a go to test your RAM..
www.memtest86.com

[kojak22]

i am having troubles downloading memtest86.
any other ways to test RAM?

[l337_GuY]

Theres one from microsoft. Not sure what its called though, you can jump on their website and search up memory diagnostic and see what you can find.
What problems are you having with downloading memtest86?

[kojak22]

i dont know. when i try to open it up in WinRAR it will attempt to open it and then not do anything.

[Jimmy420]

If i remember right, its a self extracting file that goes to a floppy disk. Then you run it from the floppy, but its been so long since i used it, it might be different.

[kojak22]

i just recently discovered that my computer runs Counter-Strike perfectly.
played for an hour and a half until i got bored. no freezing or crashing.
then i thought that i had fixed it because i took my compy apart and put it back together and tried WoW again and still 5-10 min then a freeze or restart. My temp for my videocard when playing CS was 41-43C. when it crashes or restarts in WoW its normally like 39-41C. what is goin on?

[l337_GuY]

I guess WoW is using more RAM, which is more likely to cause it to crash if the RAM is bad. Try downloading winzip to unzip it, or 7zip. (the memtest86)

[kojak22]

just ordered some arctic silver and applied it to my CPU.
Ran wow and got a long playing time and thought it was fixed.
about 20 min in it crashed... does this pretty much prove its RAM?

[kojak22]

anyone? eh? Proven RAM problem?

[kojak22]

another thing came up. when i play garry's mod i can play forever but when i load a saved game, it will eventually crash. does this help at all, and still, what is going on

[Gargamel]

ITS YOUR RAM!







memtest86+ will work too try both. you need to download it, unzip it then burn it to a cd or copy and paste to a floppy as a disc image , you cannot run it from windows, you must restart windows and boot from the disc that you put the disc image on.