Crashing on Quad-Core Pentium 4 Xeon

[Xonitex]

I have a friend who has a quad-core Pentium 4 Xeon (3.06GHz) and an nVidia Quadro4 980 XGL video card at 300MHz/650MHz. Whenever he plays games, the computer crashes after a short amount of time and displays a weird pattern on the screen (like artifacts, but all over the screen...sometimes it's a pattern, like a quilt). Do you guys know what might be wrong? It doesn't just do this for new games but for old games like Quake 3 and for 3D games like Diablo II. What the hell? Anyways, his CPU core temperature is ~64 degrees...he's using the latest drivers and I don't think it's a driver issue because he has another computer with the exact same spec's and it's not having any issues, even with Call of Duty 2. I can't check his GPU temperature. Also, his computer is fine when not playing games.

Thanks for the replies.

 

[Xonitex]

Well, yeah, the system is definitely not optimized for gaming (especially the GPU) but it should be able to at least run games without screwing up. Plus, he's a Mac guy, so I'm glad that he's using a PC at all.

 

[Joe_The_Dragon]

power? you may have a weak psu

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

Hey, I happen to like macs.

Anyways, yeah. Like Joe_The_Dragon said, what's the PSU like? might be weak. I mean I've seen SOME games like the sims and crap run on a dual-xeon setup but there's no real performance gain since it's only like dual-threaded at most.

I think it's a combo of the PSU and the GPU, but that's just me.

 

[Dan1317]

I doubt it is the graphics card, Quake 3 is an open GL game, and thread starter said it even had trouble playing quake

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

Hmm... Then I wonder... I'm out of ideas right now.

 

[FITCamaro]

It could be that quad core Netburst Xeon's don't exist.

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

Hmm... true... but I think what he meant is that he has 2 dual-core xeons. You know, now that I think about it, if it's netburst they had problems with that since it automatically tries to split the thread into parallel threads. It could be that the game just doesn't support that many threads and thus problems occur. Alas though, this is only a theory.