Games crash and I have to restart

[thegatekeeper]

Hi guys, I am having a really annoying problem with my computer that I can't seem to fix. Basically what happens is that when I am playing a game it will randomly crash. It does this really weird sound before crashing, not sure why.

Now for the really strange part. After the game crashes, all other applications like Skype, Firefox, etc simply stop working too. I am also unable to start up any game again until I restart my computer.

I have the latest graphic card drivers and I just did a clean install, and I also scanned my computer for viruses. It is not overheating.

What else could be wrong?

Thanks!

 

[soundguruman]

When did you buy your asus motherboard?

 

[thegatekeeper]

About 3 years ago (the info in my profile is out dated). You think it is a motherboard issue?

 

[Hawkeye22]

if you are certain it's not a heating problem or defective video card, then check your ram. try running memtest86+ for a few hours and see if it finds any errors.

http://memtest.org/

 

[thegatekeeper]

I already ran memtest and it didn't find any errors. I am not 100% certain it isn't a heating problem, but the CPU and GPU are not overheating.

I guess a little backstory is needed. What happened at first was that I was getting a lot of blue screens when playing games. I opened up my case and cleaned the motherboard and they stopped showing up, so I guess it was heat build up from the dust. Then I started getting these errors, which are really weird. If it was a hardware problem, wouldn't a blue screen show up?

I was able to start up the game after it crashed last night, and it looked really mangled. If I had to take a wild guess, I think it's the graphics driver crashing or something. I will try to take some screenshots if it happens again.

Any tests I can run while it is in the "crashed" state to see what is wrong?

 

[Hawkeye22]

If it was a hardware problem, wouldn't a blue screen show up?

It depends on the severity. Bad VRAM (video ram) will usually show screen corruption. A misbehaving video driver on the other hand will most likely blue screen.

Grab a copy of HWMonitor or some other utility that can read temperatures.

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

 

[thegatekeeper]

It depends on the severity. Bad VRAM (video ram) will usually show screen corruption. A misbehaving video driver on the other hand will most likely blue screen.

Grab a copy of HWMonitor or some other utility that can read temperatures.

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

I already mentioned in the previous post that my CPU and GPU are not overheating, or are you talking about other temps. And even if they were, I would expect a blue screen and not what is happening. This is really hard to explain, but I sure hope I can fix it.

 

[Hawkeye22]

HWMonitor will also list system temps which is the chipset temperature. Chipsets don't normally overheat unless you are overclocking, it's defective, or you have poor case ventilation. I forgot to ask if you were overclocking your CPU or GPU, but if you are, try resetting to defaults and see if that helps. Another way to test for heat problems is to try gaming with your computers case cover removed. if it doesn't crash, it's most likely a heat problem.

 

[thegatekeeper]

HWMonitor will also list system temps which is the chipset temperature. Chipsets don't normally overheat unless you are overclocking, it's defective, or you have poor case ventilation. I forgot to ask if you were overclocking your CPU or GPU, but if you are, try resetting to defaults and see if that helps. Another way to test for heat problems is to try gaming with your computers case cover removed. if it doesn't crash, it's most likely a heat problem.

Going to try this tonight, thanks.