System Hangup/restart

[The_NiF]

I recently bought and put together the following computer:
Abit IC7 motherboard
Pentium 4 2,8 GHz with HT
2x 256 MB Kingston HyperX pc3200 DDR CL 222
Radeon 9700 Pro
Soundblaster Audigy
Maxtor 80 GB 7200 RPM harddrive
16x ASUS DVD-drive

At first it all looked well when i put the things together and booted for the first time. I started installing WindowsXP Professional and some weird problems ocurred. The system would sometimes spontanously restart during the installation. When i finally finished the installation i installed some games, Quake3, GTA vice city..
But when i start Quake3(v 1.32) the system sometimes spontaneously reboots itself. And when i get back in to windows XP it displays this annoying errormessage where i can "send" or "dont send" information to microsoft about the error. I went in to bios to check if everything was allright, and saw that the CPU idle-temperature(with the Intel-cooler that came with my CPU) was 59 degrees Celcius!!
I doublechecked it in windows with hardwaremonitoring utility and it sometimes reached 63 degrees celcius when running Quake3. No matter what the CPU remained in the 58-61 degrees celcius even when just idling in bios. So i went down and bought a new cooler "ThermalTake volcano 7+" and the cpu went down to 51 degrees C idle and 58 degrees C when running Quake3(with the CPU-fan running at 6000 RPM(max)). My quake3 have stopped restarting spontaneously but it keeps restarting in vice city.
I have run with an open case ALL the time.

So i have a bunch of questions and hope someone can help me.
1. If the problem really was related to temperature, why did the P4 Thermalthrottling not just kick in? why these weird spontaneous restards?
2. If it really is NOT related to the temperature, then why did it help on the spontaneous restarts in Quake3 when i bought a new cooler?
3. What temperature should a Pentium 4 2,8 GHz be when idle and when under stress?

I should mention that i have not installed the sensorcable that comes with the coolers or CPU. I read the temperature in BIOS from the CPU.
The temperature in my case, when open, never go beyond 37 degrees celcius.

 

[slvr_phoenix]

That's quite a selection of hardware, yet no mention of your power supply. To be honest, it sounds like a power problem to me. It could also possibly be a memory problem.

The new heatsink problably either uses slightly less power or it keeps the heat from heading over towards the memory. I'd relax your memory settings a bit and monitor the voltages of your power supply to see if any are under their proper ratings.

I could easily be wrong, but that's what it sounds like to me.

"<i>Yeah, if you treat them like equals, it'll only encourage them to think they <b>ARE</b> your equals.</i>" - Thief from <A HREF="http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=030603" target="_new">8-Bit Theater</A>