Novice needs experienced gamers help

[tedbprice]

I built my rig with the help of a friend, which i sort of regret. anyway. I run nvidia gts 250. It is overclocked, which I am not even sure I need to do. I have 4 gigs of RAM and when playing games it freezes up. Everything is about a year old, but it has never really run well. I am really new at all of this and need some help. My BIOS is set to things that I didn't have a say in, he just did it because it is all greek to me. I understand a little of it now but really need help. This sucks. Please help me out.

 

[obiwan8000]

It's interesting that the fan seemed to work. If you can experiment with a few things and see how it reacts that could help a lot:

If you run it without the fan on it does it still freeze in the same "exact" place? I mean - to the point where it's completely predictable.

With the fan on it - does the freezing point change? And does it always last much longer than without the fan?

I had issues with my CPU heatsink not being seated properly once - however - this led to the computer freezing just after BIOS since the CPU get's hot and any small overheat will cause an auto shutdown.

One step at a time though.

 

[tedbprice]

The fan seems to help, but eventually it always freezes up. This is really annoying.

 

[obiwan8000]

Yeah it's very frustrating.

Have you reset the card so it is no longer overclocked?

Also - is it all games or just a single game? and which one / ones?

Will it ever freeze outside of graphically intense applications? - i.e. on desktop... web browser, etc.

 

[tedbprice]

It never freezes except in games. arkham asylum, space marine, It used to crash all the time, I have never really been happy. Spent a lot of money with the help of a computer savvy friend. I myself know little, but am learning. Reset cmos and put BIOS back to defaults. I was really hoping that would fix it. It didn't. Worried I may have damaged my CPU

 

[GreenDutchAlien]

Did you change anything on the nvidea panel and if so can you set everything back to default and then see what happens.

 

[obiwan8000]

Just wondering - did you install the CPU / heatsink yourself? or did you buy the mobo with the CPU seated, installed, etc.?

I would also say to go through your entire system and make sure everything is in tight. RAM, graphics card(s), power cables all seated nicely, all pins in as they should be.

Hoped you could try another PCI-e slot, but looks like your mobo only has one :-\

Part of the problem is in order to diagnose this you may have to start swapping parts out for new ones - one part at a time. If there's a way you can get a hold of another card and try that, that'd be a good start.

In my experience, it ended up being my heatsink not seated properly and I had to even out the layers of silver compound. Then after all that troubleshooting it ended up being my video cards were overheating.

Is your video card fan functioning properly?

Are the games up to date also? Have you tried to dumb down the graphics settings? crank them down to bare minimum and see if they still freeze.

It's a very tedious, facepalm-ing business, lol... but you will learn ALOT about this stuff by your mistakes, trial and error, etc.

 

[tedbprice]

Yeah, I am beginning to come to grips with the fact that I may be just replacing parts soon. I am worried that I could have damaged the graphics card when it was overclocked. Or the CPU.

 

[obiwan8000]

Sadly it could really be anything. Do you have access to another card you can use to test? If you swap the card out and try the games and it still freezes then it's (probably) not your card.

You can always do the same with the CPU, or at the very least - try to reseat the heatsink.

If it's the CPU then you got a whole bag of questions to answer, lol

Let's just keep ruling things out and prioritizing the potential "bad-guy"

 

[gnomio]

First do a clean boot. Go to start enter msconfig then at the services tab. Hide ms services then disable all. Reboot your pc.

Test it.