Pc completely freezing when playing games - advices needed

Obscura

So I'm having this issue. The interesting in this is that it is freezing when I'm playing games, mostly with multi player games (even Quake3 can freeze it lol...), but sometimes with single player games too, and not, when I'm doing cpu and gpu heavy operations like offline rendering or displaying millions of polygons with expensive shaders in real time, etc. I already did some searches on the internet, and some people were suggesting to replace the thermal greese between the cpu and the fan, but my greese there is pretty new. Others were suggesting to clean out the fan, but again, that is also almost new (well, its used, but it wasn't dirty at all when I've put it in). So I would be surprised if it would be an overheating. The cpu is an intel q6600 and the vga is a geforce GT240. Any ideas?

-Hopefully this is the proper place for a this kind of question here on polycount, I wasn't sure, so I've put it here.

Chromogen

If you think it might be overheating I would suggest downloading speedfan. It monitors temperatures inside your machine. As for this question on polycount you might be better served on a computer hardware forum. Are you sure your getting adequate power to all of you components?

Obscura

Thanks. Okay, I downloaded that software, and I'm viewing the temperatures now. I started the LoL launcher, it started patching, and the temperature of the processor cores went around 55-62C. Its around 40C in idle state. That looks too much for a this simple thing to me, so it must be an overheating... How can I check if its the fan or the greese?

Obscura

Update... After the patching, I started the game, and after I loaded in, it freezed again almost instantly. I was watching the temperatures on the secondary monitor, and actually this time it wasn't too hot. The cpu cores and the gpu was also on 50C. This started being confusing.

MikeF

Has this always happened or just started?
I had this issue on an old build and it turned out that it was mismatched RAM

Obscura

I realized this a few months ago, but I ignored it because I rarely play games and it does this just when I'm playing.

Anyways, I opened up the pc for checking if the cooler is set up properly, and I found an incorretly set up leg. I fixed it,put back to the proper place, position, and things went worse. Now the cpu has almost 60C temperature at idle state. Maybe I pushed out the greeze or I don't know. So I rather turned it off, I do't want a dead cpu

Obscura

I was looking around in my gadget collection, and I found a dualcore cpu and it's cooler. I replaced the q6600's cooler to this, just for testing, and whoala... Now it is running at 40C in idle state. But is this safe? I mean The cooler easily matched the holes on the motherboard, and it looks like it works much much better, but it was used with a dualcore CPU and this is a core2quad.

Edit: I found a mismatched memory too -.- Now its removed and I'm testing if its still freezing.

iadagraca

[deleted]

Obscura

iadagraca - depth of field eh? ...

Anyways, removing the mismatched ram doesn't help, its still freezing.
Replacing the cooler helped a bit, now the overall temperature is a lot better, but it was at 68 again at the last freeze. The gpu's temperature was ok. I have no idea now.

[Deleted User]

Maybe your HDD is failing. Some parts of it may be hard to read and it slows down. Believe me, it can takes ages before systems starts working with normal speed if it tries to read still functional but failing part of the disk. Test it with something like HDD Tune Pro.

Chromogen

Those temps are not to out of whack I dont think it is a temperature issue you are having.

iadagraca

(what i meant to post before i got distracted by maya 2016)

Try completely uninstalling your graphics drivers, it does wonders. I once had an issue where my computer would power down minutes after booting but not in safe mode.

Eventually got hints that it could be driver issues but uninstalling didn't help till i found out about this.

http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

^the purpose of this is to completely clear out your graphics driver, legacy and all. Once done, reboot install latest drivers and you might be good.

Obscura

I've run HD Tune, and it didn't find any issue with the HDD. The next try will be to completely remove the vga driver. I'll report back later.

After 8 hours of run, it looks like the new cooler works fine, it still gives better cooling than the original by the way.

Thank you all for the help!

skyline5gtr

Best thing to do is start to remove variables. Make sure system is not overclocking and set is to basic settings in bios. Then get a few monitor programs like CPU-Z and Hardware Monitor so you can see the temps voltage and such during load.

Download Intel's burn test and prime 95, run them while generating a log file of heat and , see if it freezes and go from there. If it does not freeze after a while and your temps are ok then move on to other possible suspects

pigart

I burnt my hard drive on my old laptop not too long ago. At first it would freeze every now and then while playing games, then it started freezing more and more untill it got to the point where it would freeze almost instantly after being turned on.