Hello all.
I built my own computer some time ago, and for a period it worked well, but then began to crash and restart itself while under load. Not heavy load, mind you. Even decade old games like Half-Life 2 and Painkiller are enough to crash the system. I can boot up any game, and within 15-30 seconds the crash will happen. Internet browsing, video watching, and so on is no problem. What is strange, is the lengths I've taken to try to solve this problem.
- I bought a new graphics card and installed it. The problem persisted. I RMAed my new graphics card just to triple check, and the problem persisted with the third card. My current card is a GTX 650 TI Boost.
- I bought a new power supply, certain that it was the problem. But nothing changed. My new power supply is the XFX 550W.
- I reinstalled Windows on a new hard drive.
- I removed my processor, cleaned it, reapplied new thermal paste very carefully, then put it back in.
- I opened my computer case and pointed a box fan inside while testing it. Since my case is a little Antec P180 and I have five hard drives inside, I thought ambient air temperature could have something to do with it. Nope.
- I ran MSI Afterburner and cranked my fan speed to 100%. This also did not help.
At this point I'm convinced it has to be my motherboard somehow, but I was also convinced it was my power supply and video card. Before I pull the trigger on yet another new component I'd like to ask if there's something else I might be overlooking?
Here's my full build at the moment:
CPU: AMD Athlon II X3 445
Mobo: ASUS M4A78LT-M LE
RAM: 4GB Kingston
Graphics: GTX 650 Ti Boost
PSU: XFX 550W
OS: Windows 7
When I reboot I get the "Windows recovered from an unexpected shutdown" dialog box. I'm not sure if the info they give there is useful at all, but I do have a minidump file and other numbers I don't know how to interpret or if they would even be useful.
Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks for reading.
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bizarre seemingly inexplicable problem computer restarting load