[PsychoCoder]

Before I get to the problem I'll share my system specs:

• AMD Athlon II X4 Denab 125 watt quad core processor
  
• MSI NF980-G65 NVIDIA nForce 980a Motherboard
  
• 2x MSI N250GTS TwinFrozr 1G OC GeForce GTS 250 1GB video cards
  
• 8GB OCZ Flex II DDR3 memory
  
• Thermaltake 1200 watt ATX PSU
  
• HDD: (too many to list so I'll just list a couple)
  • 2 x 320 GB Western Digital SATA (Internal)
    
  • 2 x 320 GB Seagate SATA (Internal)
    
  • Seagate 160 GB SATA (Internal)
    
  • 1 Seagate 1TB (External)
    
  • 1 Western Digital 500GB (External)

Here's my issue, whenever I go to play a game, say Call of Duty 4 : Modern Warfare, the game plays excellent, then about 30 minutes into it the game crashes (sometimes the whole system) and the desktop graphics and such get all weird and scrambled. I think for some reason my system us overheating but when I try and run HWiNFO32 (to get temps and system information) the whole computer just freeze and I have to do a hard boot.

So, given that am I overheating as I assume or is something else going on? When not gaming nothing like this happens, I can run as many applications as I wish with no issues, it's only when playing a game that it happens. I was thinking NVIDIA drivers but I've tried a couple different versions so far and the same thing happens.

Oh, running Windows 7 Ultimate by the way.

[PsychoCoder]

Forgot to mention cooling fans:

• 3 x 140mm fans on side panel
  
• 2 x 90mm fans (one front one back)
  
• Each video card has 2 fans attached (It's MSI's Twin Frozr thermal design

[Martyr2]

Wow, with all that you are going to either have a heat issue or some kind of power issue. The only recommendation I could make is to take some of the gear out of the equation and reduce the load. Take a few HDD off the board (just unplug them so they are not drawing juice) and try going down to one video card for the moment. Then try COD4 again to see if you still have a problem. It is just me but I would never put that much gear into a single case and also expect to cool it just with fans. But that is just me. I would try taking unnecessary gear offline and try again.

This post has been edited by Martyr2: 21 November 2009 - 11:37 PM

[KYA]

Are the card fans operating at 100%? Some cards don't auto adjust depending on load, like with mine, i have to manually adjust it at boot.


How about a back exhaust fan? I have one situated just below my card so it immediately sends all that hot air outside the case.


I've been using this and I'm very pleased so far.

[PsychoCoder]

@KYA: I have a 90mm exhaust fan on the back of the case and a 90mm intake fan on the front side of the case, along with 3 140mm fans on the side panel. As for the fans on the card, I'm not finding anywhere where I can adjust that to be 100%, I'll keep checking though.

Thanks for the thoughts

[KYA]

nTune should let you adjust it. Rivatuner can do it as well.

[PsychoCoder]

Thanks @KYA, nTune showed that the fans were running at a fixed 25% of capacity (and the core temp of the card was 65c), so I turned the fans up to 100% and the core temp dropped to 31c

[PsychoCoder]

This is resolved, I had CoD4:MW on for over an hour and no crash so it was an overheating issue (Thanks @KYA for the idea of nTune, which allowed me to turn the fans up)