Every games crashes

[Aelric]

I'm at a complete loss. About a month ago I installed GTA 4 on my computer and experiences my first crash since I bought the system last year. Since then I've been experiencing random freezes and crashes for all my games. Sometimes my screen will fill with random textures and freeze, other times a "purple mist" freezes my games, and other times it'll simply crash to the desktop. Mind you, this isn't just for GTA 4, which I haven't played in some time, but for ALL games, including ones that never gave me problems before. Fallout 3: crashed, NWN2: crashed, Just Cause: crashed, Splinter Cell: crashed. Even older games like Sim City 4 are crashing. I would just figure I didn't have powerful enough a system if it weren't for the fact that they all used to work perfectly.

Now I've updated, rolled back and re-installed literally every driver on my system. I've formatted my drives and re-installed windows. I upgraded to Vista and then returned to XP. Nothing seems to be fixing the problem and the worst thing is, I can't determine what the problem is because the crashes are random. Sometimes they happen a few minutes after starting up the game, other times they don't happen for a few hours. My temps during crashes do not seem to rise, either.

My guess is a dead card. GTA 4 was over my system and I'm afraid I fried my graphics card. Although, by that logic, I shouldn't even be able to start half of these games, none the less play them smoothly until the crash. I really do not want to buy a new one until I know for sure what the problem is and if I can get it fixed without paying anything.

By the way, my system info is:

nVidia 8800 GT 512MB
2 GB RAM
Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.17 Mhz

[quaxo]

You didn't mention anything about system temperatures. Have you checked those? Sounds like you're overheating.

[patio]

Also what is the Make and wattage of the PSU ? ?

[Aelric]

I suspected overheating as well, however, My temps a keeping at a fairly steady 30C, which they always run at.

As for wattage, I've got a 650W power supply. Am I possibly underpowered? I'm seriously starting to think it's a voodoo hex.

[Aelric]

Dear lord, I just retested my temps. I had apparently I've been reading my main system temp. I just used RivaTuner to observe a crash and it registered 107C at the time of the crash. SO I guess it really is overheating. My big question now is, how did it get so bad? I used to run so well. The fan on the GPU is still running. Suggestions and theories?

[BC_Programmer]

The fan on the GPU is still running.

did you double-check this?

I had a similar  experience, in that a game would simply appear to freeze for a good 2 minutes, and then continue on as normal. Turns out the graphics driver was crashing hard, and windows was able to recover each time and let the game go on.


I used RivaTuner at some point to underclock the card bac kto the factory setting for the chip (the card came overclocked) which seemed to fix it.

Later on down the road- I opened up my case for one reason or another, and noticed that my GPU fan was tilted... and busted completely. I was able to replace it with a fan from a similar model card I owned, and then even put the clock back up to the "default" overclocked state I bought it at.