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Computer crashes when playing certain games

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Hardware:

Mob: ASRock 880g Extreme3
GPU: Sapphire HD 7870 GHZ OC Edition 2GB
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition 3.2GHz
PSU: XFX 650W XXX Edition
HDD: Seagate ST31000528AS 1TB SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache
SSD: Crucial 64GB M4
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1866Mhz
and I will soon be purchasing an Asus Xonar D2X soundcard (most likely this one)
I think that is everything relevant, anyway it's all currently at stock clocks although I have fiddled around with setting previously.

The problem: basically my screen goes black and from my speakers/headset there is a buzzing sound, which I am almost certain is the audio stuttering. This happens on League of Legends quite frequently, and has also happened on Day Z (ARMA 2) and Magicka. I am almost always running Skype and Steam at the same time. It has never crashed on some games, but the only two I have played enough hours to be certain about are Diablo 3 and Bastion.
With 5 case fans and a more than adequate CPU cooler, I can immediately discount any overheating problems (I have used HWMonitor to check temps are okay). Also it is likely relevant to note that Prime95, several graphics tests and memtest (I believe it is called) have all run fine.

Does anyone know what the issue is or the solution to this?


PS Sorry if this has been posted before, I've had a quick look around but none of the crashes seemed to be quite the same, and I thought it might be to do with my hardware.

More about : computer crashes playing games

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This is a longshot

Count how long it takes for the said games to crash and then reboot , run same game but this time switch to windowed mode and play it like that to see if it's stable

Will give it a go, hadn't thought of trying windowed mode. It takes varying times to crash, sometimes I can play for over an hour and it's fine and other times it crashes within 10 minutes.

I was just playing Minecraft (Tekkit mod) in windowed mode, and it did the same crash as I get on other (fullscreen) games, except the display didn't go black, it just froze. Anyone got any ideas?
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Is your CPU or your GPU overclocked? I beleive this sounds like an unstable overclock that hangs the OS on high loads. If anything at all onboard your system is overclocked, I would suggest downclocking right now and testing your stuff. Also, check to make sure your CPU heatsink is seated properly and has a nice and reasonable coat of thermal compound, as your CPU could POSSIBLY be locking up due to high temps. On a less likely note, check for viruses, and uhh, maybe give your storage volumes a good defragmenting. Severe fragmentation can cause problems like this, but as I said before your not likely running on a REALLY REALLY fragmented system.

Sorry for not replying for a while, but I wanted to play quite a few games before reporting back. Using windowed mode seems to have fixed it, thanks razgriz. Also thedeathclox, nothing is overclocked, I thought I had said that in my first post, in any case thanks for the reply and you reminded me to defrag which I haven't done once since I got my hard drive.
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