Cpu turned off while playing games

[benniego692003]

My computer (cpu) keeps on turning off while playing any kind of games. But browsing thru internet, using facebook or ymail it does not turn off. It is consistent on turning off while playing any games only.
Please advise. Thanks in advance.

 

[house70]

Could be a heating issue. Make sure the heatsink and fan are clean, or you can clean them with some compressed air.
If any recent modifications done to it, or if moved around recently, make sure the CPU's heatsink and fan are not displaced. If older than a few years, you may want to re-do the thermal paste job on the CPU and then re-seat the heatsink and fan.
Run some benchmarks, like prime95, and see if it happens during these. you could run memtest, also, to check your memory.

 

[diellur]

For clarity, I'm going to assume that you mean your computer is resetting itself during games. Has this behaviour started recently, and have you recently over-clocked? If it's not doing it at any other point, it should be noted that the gaming is likely the most demanding task your getting your computer to do, and therefore the one that creates the most heat. A computer reset might be a sign of overheating. There's two things you can do:

1) Download HW Monitor - http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html. Run your games in windowed mode for a while when HW Monitor is running, and see what the CPU temperatures are doing.

2) When the computer resets, go into your BIOS. You should have an option for PC Health Status or something similar, where you can see your CPU temperature.

If they're unusually high then I'd say that's your problem. A solution would be to remove the CPU heatsink and the thermal paste, re-apply fresh paste and then re-seat the CPU heatsink. Or even get a new heatsink. Check the heatsink fan too, it may have failed.

 

[ethel]

I agree with above posts - probably the CPU or the graphics card overheating. You can monitor the graphics card temperature with atitool (ati) or rivatuner (nvidia). Try opening the case up - if it is overheating that will probably make it happen less.

It could also be the power supply running out of juice. Can you tell us what components you have and the wattage of your PSU?

 

[sepayne21]

cpu/vid card/power supply. my first suspect would be the power supply is burdened down. you can check this if you have a voltage rail monitoring program.

open voltage rail monitor program, open any cpu/gpu intensive game in windowed mode, and observe your 12V rail. if it drops to 11.8 or less, i'd say that's a problem.

for comparison sake, I have a corsair 650W. under load (phenom 2 x3 with 5870) it dropped from 12.02 to something like 11.97. with an old 550W power supply, it was dropping to 11.72ish. This would cause game crashes.

 

[simon12]

+1 to all the above it could be overheating but normally this would cause it to crash or just run badly so if its just turning off its more likely the power supply.

 

[diellur]

An overheating CPU can cause a PC to turn itself off, if the settings are active in the BIOS.