After Upgrading Hardware, 3D Games stop responding or PC Restarts

JoshuaT

Distinguished
Dec 29, 2009
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18,510
have a old emachine I bought at walmart 4 years ago, and Its still kicking.(Not for to much longer after I start kicking it). Up untill 1 week ago, I had 128 MB ATI card x550 in the pci slot. It had fried, so I used the on board graphics. I just bought 2 Gigs of Ram, BFG 550W PSU, 1 Gig GDDR3 MSI R4550 (ATI Radeon 4550 HD). I "had" windows 7 installed when I bought these parts. After Upgrading, Almost as soon as a video game loads, My PC restarts. I get from as little as 2 seconds to 30 seconds of 3d acceleration. My Pc has restarted a few times while installing a large file (I was out of the room So I did not see it restart), and Restarted while installing wow and watching youtube.

I formatted and reinstalled winXP hoping that would fix something..It didnt. I get restarts and stopped responding errors. More errors than restarts. This video card requires 350w power supply. I have tested this both 350w and 550w PSUs.

I have the most up-to-date drivers for my card and almost everything Device Doctor Portable said I needed updates on. My Specs are

AMD Semperon 3100 (1.8ghz)

Mobo: FIC K8MC51G (2 PCI, 1 PCI-E x1, 1 PCI-E x16, 2 DDR DIMM, Audio, Video, LAN)

System Memory 2048 MB (PC3200 DDR SDRAM) DIMM1: Wintec 1 GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (3.0-3-3-8 @ 200 MHz) (2.5-3-3-7 @ 166 MHz) (2.0-2-2-6 @ 133 MHz) (same with slot 2, total of 2 GIG of DDR ram)

Video Adapter ATI Radeon HD 4550 (1024 MB)

If you need anymore specs just let me know. All Drivers are up-to-date, Inside tower is clean, Heatsink and fans. Fans are running. My video card has a passive heatsink rather than a fan, So i hope it is working as intended. Any help will be appreciated
 

Cerebro_6666

Distinguished
Dec 30, 2009
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18,510
well something like that happened to me I have an ATI Radeon X300/X550/X1050 on my pc but I did nothing weird to my computer and it became unstable it restart a lot of times and don`t stop until I turn it off, so I reinstalled windows XP on my pc and it work very well until I installed the ati driver it became unstable again so now I`m here working in my pc without a driver so I can`t play my favorite online game because that. I hope comebody can help :cry: