PC shuts down during gaming

[Xzar]

My friend has a PC bought 1 month ago. I am going to his house tomorrow to help him. Any advice I can get would be highly appreciated.

Here are the specs as I remember them:

P5Q Asus motherboard
Q9650 with stock cooler
4 GB of OCZ RAM
Sapphire 4850 Radeon
550W Antec TruePower Trio
3 case fans

When his brother plays Oblivion or even old games like Warcraft 3, the system either shuts down or gets a blue screen of death.

He reformatted his C drive and re-installed windows XP, yet the problem still persists. His D drive which contain all his data was not re-formatted, so perhaps a virus still remains.

What could have caused this problem?

-A virus?: Can a virus be powerful enough to make a system shut down? I think its unlikely.

-High Temperature which makes the motherboard automatically shut down? Maybe. I will install speedfan and have him play his games to check the temperature. Nvidia cards can use RivaTuner to display a graph of the temperatures. Are there any apps for Ati Cards that can display a graph? If I cant see a graph, then the time between alt-tabbing and checking the built-in ATI temp reader app could be enough to reduce the card temp by a few degrees.

-Defective Power supply? I asked the salesman and he said this 550W power supply is more than good enough for this system. But maybe this individual power supply unit is defective. But even after the PC shuts down, he can power it back on right away without problem, so I personally think thats its unlikely that the Power Supply is the issue.

-Defective motherboard? Maybe. I heard a lot of bad stories about the P5Q motherboard. Ill try to flash the BIOS and see if it fixes things.

-Memory problem? Ill run memtest from my Ubuntu Live CD and see how that goes.

Do you guys think anything else could have caused this problem? Weird stuff like his electric power surge protector being cheap or stuff like that? If you have any advice concerning this matter, feel free to share them.

Thanks in advance.

 

[nate1554]

GPU-Z Can record data in a .txt document for the ATI cards.

 

[megamanx00]

Could be a defective power supply. Best way to check is to use another one you know that works. I'm guessing though it's probably a heat or memory problem. I'd check the RAM settings and ty to see if it isn't one of those kits that only runs at DDR2 800 with 2.0 or 2.1 voltage (just an overclocked DDR2 667 kit). Could be the thermal grease wasn't applied properly so take your own just in case, and finally it could be a defective video card. Like nate suggests use GPU-Z.

 

[foolycooly]

does he have the 9650 overclocked?

 

[Xzar]

My friend fixed it by himself before I got there. It seems that it was a software problem rather than a hardware one.

Thanks for the information, next time that someone I know has a hardware problem I now have more approaches to solving the problem.

My friend's q9650 is not overclocked.