Last year I had a major problem with my PC. It would randomly turn off when playing an intensive game although there was the odd occasion where it turned off when doing nothing. When I say turn off I don't mean just going into hibernate. It would completely power off as if the plug had been pulled out! However I changed the ram for some out of another machine and the problem seemed to go away. 5 months later its happening again! This time it seemed to start when I upgraded my ram but I tried putting the old stuff back in and there was no change. I just can't work out why the machine is turning off. My processor is cool never going above 48c. My graphics card is also within its heat limits.(even tried turning game graphics down to the bare minimum and it still turns off.) Ive tested my ram with 2 different test programs and there were no problems. Tried different ram Done numurous virus checks. Used norton system works to try and find errors on the disk. I tried formatting the HDD and even tried a brand new one. Tried the pc in another power outlet. Completely dusted the machine and cleaned out the ram pcie and power slots. Tried a different power cable. I even tried when the comp had just the bare minimum of software on it thinking that something might be conflicting. I just can't figure it out. The fact that it mostly happens when playing games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Doom 3, Medieval 2 and Oblivion suggest possible overheating but it doesn't explain why once in a while it'll turn off when just using something like Word. Im out of ideas Can anyone suggest anything. Here are my specs CPU: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ MOTHERBOARD: Asus A8N Sli Premium RAM: 2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR GPU: Radeon X1800 XT 512mb PSU: Antec Neo HE 500w (modular) "(EDIT)" Just checked the output voltages of my psu... Vcore: 1.3 to 1.5 +3.3: 3.20 +5.0: 4.81 +12.0: 11.84 My previous computer was spot on with these values. Do these values look problematic?
It sounds like to me it is a bad Video adapter/graphics card... Try changing it to something else, I would try a plain stock one just too see if that was the problem.
How are you testing the voltages? With a multimeter or through BIOS or some monitoring utility (Asus PC Probe, Speedfan, etc.)?
