possiable hardware issue

[dmbjohn]

Hello all I am hoping someone can help me out here.
I have an issue with age of empires 3 and things are leading me to believe it is hardware related.

When I play that game almost always at some point and it is not a consistent spot in it the computer or video card crashes and can not recover. I currently only own two computer games, or I should say only play two and the afore mentioned AOE3 and I also have Star Trek Armada 2. Those are all I have.
Armada 2 also will crash occasionally but not all the time like AOE3 and when Armada crashes it just crashes the game not the entire computer windows is always fine

My system:
Motherboard Asrock 775V88
Power supply Epower 520 cheetah
CPU Intel 505J 2.66 overclocked to 2.92
Ram PC3200 PQI 4X@512
Sound Creative Audigy 2 ZS
Video Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600 Atlantis
HDD Maxtor 100 GB serial 1.5 quick view
Maxtor 80GB IDE
Seagate 250 GB Serial 1.5
External HDD Seagate 160 GB in a Mac power enclosure fire wire
Lacie 160 Porsche fire wire
Disc Drives Asus dvd rw/ram
NEC dvd rw

this has been an issue for some time now it seems to be getting worse it is now every time i play the game I have formated several times swapped memory to different slots. I think i have been through the hoops but it is likely i am missing something I am sure PQI is not the greatest memory company in the world but at the time i built the computer it was what i could afford. the video card was added later in an attempt to actualy do anything involving graphics I previously had a very old PCI card with 4 mb on card ram

 

[LORD]

I see 3 possibilities :-

1. Update the graphics drivers if you dont have the latest ones.

2. You have 4 HDD's and 2 optical drives as far as I can see, probably drawing a lot of power. Try disconnecting the drives that aren't critical temporarily to check the the PSU is throwing out enough juice. When you run a game the gfx card will use more power than normal and your PSU might not be sufficient.

3. With all those drives in your case its a possibility that you have an overheating issue with either the CPU or the gfx card. Try running the machine with the side of the case off and a fan blowing into it.

 

[dmbjohn]

I have a scythe ninja heat sink on the CPU with 120mm fan
only three hard drives are in the computer the others are external with their own power plug in

the power supply is a 520W

I did fail to mention I use alcohol 120% and ruin games from my hard drive instead of using the cd drive but i will try unhook the unnessery drives

the gfx card does not have its own power connector either it is an AGP4x/8x
i belive things are set at 8x

my ram is also in dual channel mode

i have thought about upgrading the video card to one that has its own power connector on it my power supply does have a connector for a video card

overheating is a possiability on my case all sides are perferated and i currently have a fan blowing at the card at last count i have a 120 fan in the front of the case and 4 80mm fans one on top blowing in two on the side blowing in and one in back blowing out also there is a 120 on the cpu heatsink and the powersupply has three fans one blowing out and two sucking air out of the case in to the powersupply and then out