Random shut down

[fusiono71]

Hey,
My computer is randomly shutting down. It has plenty of power and in fact a new power supply was bought to try to fix this problem. I am running and AMD 64 fx 3200 processor a Geforce 4 6200 256 mb graphics card with 1024 mb ddr ram (2 sticks). When the computer is running high processes it shuts down. Mostly games and such. I ran a memory test and during the 8 bit transfer it will shut down. This leads me to believe that the ram is bad. If any one has any other insight that could be helpful. The computer was bought 2 months ago and hopefuly is still under waranty. Does anyone know if ram can be fixed or does it have to be replaced. Can it potentially be my motherboard or some other problem.
Thanks
~Thomas

[morganlefay]

By shuting down...do you mean like "off"?

Or is it rebooting?

Or is it crashing with an error?

What OS are you running?

Have you checked your Power Options...both in the OS and BIOS?

Are you plugged into a UPS?

I have seen video drivers reboot a machine....

Also over heating CPUs.

Anything in the event viewer...as to the reason it "shut down"

MLF

[nihil]

Try this:

1. Turn off all power saving in BIOS and operating system
2. Turn off screensaver
3. No background scans in your AV
4. Delete all unwanted processes in your startup
5. Set your system to run normally...........not overclocked


And if you are overclocking you videocard...............ack phtt!

If it is under warranty, I would take it back, after all it is their problem, not yours unless you have messed with it.

[unvi$ible]

hi,
what is your motherboard?
if asus they have nice little utility called probe which tells you temerature of your cpu/motherboard and so on.
Look in bios in hardware section on what temperature is treshold set up for shut down.
if you reach sertan temperature pc will shut automaticlly.have a look satting.
playing games generare a lot of heat especcially with amd.
if you into gaming cooling is very important as amd cpu gets very hot.
do you have amd cpu fan with comes with cpu or you have better fan?
how many fans do you have?
does your pc shuts down the other times or just when playing games?
provide more datails about your components
thanks

[allenb1963]

For random shutdowns the first thing I always do is remove RAM, blow out the slots and reseat RAM. It's amazing how much havok one dust bunny can create.

[hexadecimal]

check make sure no lose screws or dust is behind your mother board on the back plate of your case

may cause a short providing temporary problems
OR
cause your board to go up in flames like my first ASUS

[The Duck]

Well, he did say that it mostly shuts down while running resource intensive programs... check your power settings in control panel (which I doubt will resolve anything), and I would jump the cmos... You won't lose any important savings unless you overclocked something, which if you did, is probably causing the problem anyway... It will also set the power settings back to the default. I would also take a can of compressed air and just start blowing out any dust.

[fusiono71]

Hey
First off how do you reset cmos? I'm 99% sure it's not a power issue as I am not overclocking and have several fans and when I monitor the temperature right before it shutdowns (in this case it goes black and everything just dies) and there never seems to be anywhere near shutdown temperature.
I doubt it's dust bunny's although I will blow it out. The computer gradualy ran into this problem. It started shutting down about a month ago and now just gradualy shuts down more often.
I ran ram32 test and on the 8 bit transfer it would shut down. However with just one stick of ram it would go farther but would still shut down.
I'm not sure the motherboard model but I believe it's gigabyte, I'll check up on that too.
Something else I just noticed is the startup screen shows 200mhz processor when really the processor is somewhere near 2.17ghz ( athlon 64 fx 3200+ )
Thanks

[zENGER]

If by CMOS you mean reset it to the factory defaults there is generally a menu that has this option. Of course every bios has a different configuration so there is no way to tell you for sure unless someone has the same board as you.

I suggest downloading http://www.odcnt.com/~zenger/files/MemTester.exe and try that one. If you can't scan your memory from a cold boot system then I wouldn't be concerned with heat at the moment. You could be having a heat issue so don't rule it out, but I don't think its the most pressing.

As far as the 200Mhz, I would guess that that is the bus speed, not the core speed.

[morganlefay]

You may want to check for an update for your MB chipset...from gigabyte and an updated video card driver.

Check the event viewer also...may have some clues.


MLF