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Games crashing to desktop

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  • PC gaming
  • Desktops
  • Games
  • Video Games
Last response: in Video Games
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April 10, 2011 6:23:11 PM

I just installed Fallout 3 and Mafia 2 and am having issues with both games crashing to the desktop, both are from steam so they should be fully up to date. I have tried the past 3 video driver releases, as well as reinstalling the audio driver and cleaning my system as much as possible otherwise.

In the past few months I have finished the witcher, assassin's creed and played wow as well, all with no issues. I use this PC for a large amount of video encoding as well as tv recording so it often stays on weeks at a time without issues.

It does not seem to be a temperature issue, and since the system doesn't struggle with 10 hour video encodes I am wondering about the GPU or PSU, although all voltages seem fine and nothing in the system is overclocked. Unfortunately I do not have the previous games installed to see if they still run well, but it is something that I may try. Any help on the next steps to take would be appreciated.

ASRock 870 Extreme3 Min 30 C Max 37 C (HWMonitor)
AMD Athlon II X3 445 Min 33 C Max 44 C
EVGA GTX 460 Min 31 C Max 65 C
G Skill DDR3 1600 2 GB x 2
Cooler Master Real Power Pro 650W
Creative Xfi Extreme Gamer
Corsair 120 GB SSD Min 28 C Max 29 C
Windows 7

More about : games crashing desktop

April 11, 2011 3:56:17 PM

I tried uninstalling drivers and removing my sound card, then running audio of the hdmi on the video card. Same issues with both games as well as Arkham Asylum.

Tried Beyond Good and Evil since I recently beat that as well and no issues there. Seems to be stress related, however nothing that HWMonitor picks up points to temp. Is there any way of stress testing a PSU?
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Best solution

April 11, 2011 6:22:03 PM

run gpu-z while your playing and get it to log in the background.

keep an eye on the vrm temps and voltages in particular.
as it may be the psu running out of steam. not enough to shut the system down, but enough to cause the gfx card to wobble and crash the game.
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April 13, 2011 4:59:20 AM

Thanks for the suggestion, I gave gpuz a try and voltages and temps were stable, so got me away from looking in the wrong direction.

Ran memtest overnight and there were no errors there, so decided to flash the bios and reinstall the chipset drivers. While I'm not 100% sure that its fixed, I was able to play for 2 hours when I would only get around a half an hour tops before, so hopefully I'm in the clear.
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April 14, 2011 2:45:27 PM

Best answer selected by zaho0006.
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