Pc shuts down while playing games, fixed for a couple of days by reapplying thermal paste, now it shuts off playing games agai

TriangleArrow · Mar 14, 2017

I've had my pc for eight years, six years ago my pc broke down and would not boot up, instead the pc case red light was on and my pc itself just made a high pitched noise, I fixed this by removing my video card, had no further no problems until last year, my pc began to shut it's self off while playing games like civilization 4 and morrowind about five minutes in to the game, i checked to make sure my hardware was plugged in and also that the temperature was good, and not knowing what else to do I just left it alone until a few days ago, after reading articles about similar issues other people had, I decided to clean my pc of dust, and reapply thermal paste, for three days after that my pc ran great, no shutting down while playing the games I mentioned earlier, however after those three days my pc went back to shutting off five minutes in to the game, it seems that reapplying thermal paste fixed my pc, I still have to reapply again to test and confirm that thermal paste made the difference, my question is this: what is the real problem with my pc, that causes it to need thermal paste reapplied every few days to work properly, and how can I fix this problem permanently?

dapandaa · Mar 14, 2017

Unless you are using a homemade thermal paste made of cardboard dust, the thermal paste isn't the thing that's making your pc work. It's something else. What program are you using to look at your temps? Many times things like this are because of bad temps, or old drivers (or some program that's some way weirdly interfering with gaming, this has happened to me)

But I would first update drivers, and then use hwmonitor to look at gpu and cpu temps. If temps are fine, I would go with running benchmarks on CPU, GPU, and RAM separately, and look if the pc shuts down. One easy fix you can try, is to just try fiddling with the settings on the games, especially try playing on windowed mode, even that might work wonders.

Also your specs could help me look further into this.

TriangleArrow · Mar 14, 2017

dapandaa :

Unless you are using a homemade thermal paste made of cardboard dust, the thermal paste isn't the thing that's making your pc work. It's something else. What program are you using to look at your temps? Many times things like this are because of bad temps, or old drivers (or some program that's some way weirdly interfering with gaming, this has happened to me)

But I would first update drivers, and then use hwmonitor to look at gpu and cpu temps. If temps are fine, I would go with running benchmarks on CPU, GPU, and RAM separately, and look if the pc shuts down. One easy fix you can try, is to just try fiddling with the settings on the games, especially try playing on windowed mode, even that might work wonders.

Also your specs could help me look further into this.

TriangleArrow · Mar 14, 2017

dapandaa :

Unless you are using a homemade thermal paste made of cardboard dust, the thermal paste isn't the thing that's making your pc work. It's something else. What program are you using to look at your temps? Many times things like this are because of bad temps, or old drivers (or some program that's some way weirdly interfering with gaming, this has happened to me)

But I would first update drivers, and then use hwmonitor to look at gpu and cpu temps. If temps are fine, I would go with running benchmarks on CPU, GPU, and RAM separately, and look if the pc shuts down. One easy fix you can try, is to just try fiddling with the settings on the games, especially try playing on windowed mode, even that might work wonders.

Also your specs could help me look further into this.

TriangleArrow · Mar 14, 2017

I check cpu temp on boot up screen moments after shut down, was running at 42 c, my specs: running windows Vista, Radeon hd5450 video card, 4.oo ram, 750w psu, AMD Athlon 64 X2 duel core cpu 5000+ 2.6GHz, after reading your reply I changed the properties of a game to run in compatibility mode windows xp service pack 2, and now it doesn't shut down right away, I logged on to game and idled for an hour and no shut down I played for 30 min and it then shut down sgain, I tried to change properties to run in window but that option wasn't available for this game, my drivers may be messed up, after last reformat I installed nvidia chip set drivers to allow me to access the Internet, I wasn't then or now running nvidia hardware but it worked till now at least, a friend put this pc together for me, i dont have the drivers for my hard ware besides the driver to my video card,

dapandaa · Mar 14, 2017

TriangleArrow :

Well you can't really check your cpu temps from the boot menu, the cpu usually takes like under 10 seconds to cool down about 10 degrees celsius, so you really should look at the temps while the game is running, so you get more accurate readings. It also sounds like your pc shuts down whenever you put a lot of load on the gpu, because idling in a game might not use as much gpu power as you'd think. So in conclusion, sounds a lot like your gpu is maybe running too hot.

But you are running a bit older tech there, I'll give you that. Running windows xp? Windows xp itself might have some compatibility issues with newer games and drivers since it's not even supported by windows anymore. Also if you haven't re-installed your system for a long time, or done any else cleaning on your system, it might also be corrupted file of some sort, or a virus. Try running a full malware check on your system, and maybe run ccleaner after that, but first check the temps on cpu and gpu WHILE gaming, update the drivers, and then you can try all the other stuff I've suggested.

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