[me10]

Hello TSG!
Basically, since reinstalling windows (though this could have been a problem that had developed before then as I had not used the computer for games for some time) I am finding when playing games (namely London 2012 and Sonic Generations which are both quite demanding on the GPU) that they work perfectly for some time and then there will be a brief pause, followed by the computer just losing power...When I turn the PC back on there are no error messages reported, as if it never happened. The CPU reports normal temperatures (45ish) when I check them shortly after.

Is this likely to be a hardware problem?
Anyone have any experience of this?

Thanks for any help,
(PC specs are above!)

me10

[benisdabom]

This could be because of overheating but I doubt it, still might be worth checking to see if it still shuts off when the case is open or when you’re blowing cold air on it with a fan.

But What I think might be going it is power failure, did you build this machine yourself? Did your replace any parts recently? because when you use more of your gpu your gpu uses more power and if the power supply cant "supply" the power then your computer will shut off due to American engineering (thank god for them) instead of causing damage to your computer.

Some thinks I would like to know:
What parts do you have in your computer?
I would like to know this so I can add up all there wattage, you can do this yourself if you would like, just Google the parts

What is the wattage on your power supply?
So I can see if you’re reaching your limit

How old is your computer?
When power supplies are under stress (meaning you using close to their max wattage) for a long time they begin to lose how much wattage they can supply, like a rechargeable battery. Depending on how close you are to the max wattage, and how old your computer is, you could be reaching your limit with your power supply.


Hope this Helps,

Ben

[benisdabom]

Just found out that you can click on the computer icon next to someone’s name for their specs, and I ran the numbers. There is no way you are using more than half of that PSU. So unless it’s overheating or you’re constantly stepping a broken D cord I am out of guesses. The reason I thought it was power failure is because I was running into a similar problem with my 2 GPU's (had a 2year old 650 and when I was gaming it would shut off constantly, but my 750 fixed that. There is one more thing you could try just to make sure that your PSU isn’t the problem, try a different one.

oh and here are the wattage's I looked up

150w Gpu
25w Cpu
1.9w Ram (x2 if the 2gb is 2 sticks)
30w Hard Drive

[me10]

Thanks for your input, I too thought it could be a PSU issue but as you said there should be plenty of electricity to go around. (I originally intended on over-clocking but never got round to it)

An interesting observation is that some GPU intensive games are running without a problem (Fallout:New Vegas) whereas others have this characteristic problem...

Are there any diagnostics I can run? The absence of any error messages or logs (as far as I know!) makes it hard to establish what the problem might be...

[me10]

Right I think I have made some progress identifying the problem:
The GPU is running too hot!
The reason why Fallout remains stable whilst the (newer) Olympics and Sonic games do not is because the strain on the GPU is much greater for the other games (as reported by GPU Monitor)

After playing the Olympics game for just 5 minutes, the GPU temperature is reported at 101 degrees, (and this is with the case open!). The idle temperature sits at around 85. (which still strikes me as rather on the warm side but I realise GPU's do run hot). With these figures it is no surprise that the computer is shutting itself down...

So how do I go about cooling the GPU?

[me10]

Seeing as this is clearly hardware issue, I'm going to create a new post in the relevant thread.
Can someone with the power please delete this thread
Cheers,
me10