I have built my own custom gaming computer, which I have done before with success. Right now in my second year of ownership, it has started powering down seemingly randomly. I know enough to connect the parts but diagnosing problems is not my forte.
Problem:
Full power down of Computer
Common Themes:
During Gaming, but not consistently, various games too (Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike: Source, Rise of Nations)
I can play a game for 5 mins and it will die, or for several hours without any fault at all. This has been happening on and off for the past 3 months.
I has yet to fail during "normal" computing
Solutions already tried:
New Graphics card -- nVidia 8800 GTX
New PSU -- Rosewill 750W Extreme
Neither of these "obvious" hardware causes are the culprit, so I was wondering if anyone had any other ideas of what could be causing this issue.
OS -- Windows XP SP 2
MOBO -- ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
RAM -- CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWINX2048-3200
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Toledo 2.4GHz Socket 939 Dual-Core Processor Model ADA4800CDBOX - Retail
HD -- Western Digital Caviar RE WD1600YD 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 1.5Gb/s Hard Drive