So lately I have noticed that games running via steam (I have tried HL2 ep2 and CoD4) crash my system in like 4-8min of play time. My monitor goes blank as if video card shut off. And then nothing happens and I have to hard reboot. The event viewer also doesnt list anything. This is a vista x64 sp1 machine. evga 8800 gtx superclocked, 174.74 drivers (same problem with 175.16 too) 1000w bfg psu, 4 gigs of ram. Ram seems fine since the system is stable otherwise. HDDs are error free too. I have tried playing more graphic intensive games like crysis and age of conan and other like WoW and they seem to be stable. CoD4 just ends up crashing my system after like 5 min. Same thing happened with HL2 ep2. Any ideas as to whats up? Something to do with vista and nvidia drivers? or something about steam is messing up? EDIT: wider problem mentioned 2 posts below.
Since it's only happening when you play games through Steam it's most likely a Steam problem. If it would be a driver problem it would happen most likely to games that are not started through Steam, too. If this would happen on my system, I think I would just uninstall Steam and reinstall it.
You could also try Event Viewer in order to find out what is causing those crashes. Click on Start => Run and type: eventvwr.msc and hit enter.
Let me actually rephrase a bit and explain a slightly more broader problem. While what happens with steam games is true and very persistant - like its not random, they do crash my system everytime (also I have only tried those two games via steam not others, so dunno if its limited to just those two or all). My system isnt all that stable either as I would hope it would have been (stable enough for day to day activities, but in game crashing a few times can get annoying over time). It does freeze randomly at other times while in a game or watching a movie over vlc player or while playing simple game like vista chess. This freeze is like system absolutely stops repsonding and have to hard reboot. But unlike steam games prob, this doent make my screen go black. Perhaps maybe since I am not in full screen mode? THis random crash happens like once every 2 days or so or maybe 3. And it happens at a random time, not like 5 min into the game or something. Like I am watching a dvd on vlc, and suddenly computer just freezes. I have rarely or never noticed this freezing happening while I am not involved in some video related activity. my 8800gtx is about an year old now. Generally idles between 63-70C. This system install is about 2 months old. 175.16 I noticed a lot more crashing so I went back to 174.74 which somehow seems better. as mentioned before, event viewer doesnt list anything at all. There is no blue screen so I cant even figure out what kind of error it is. But I have a feeling its related to video. I know bad memory could cause such stuff, but i ran memtest posted in one another thread on this forum like few instances of it and didnt notice a single error for about 20 min. besides my ram is clocked at a lower than rated setting (tighter timings rather than higher bandwidth). My psu also seems sufficient for one card. So can it be a card gone bad over time? Or just mess up of drivers? Or bad install of drivers coupled with game probs etc. :bang: Lets see how the new 280 series goes and then I will think of an upgrade...
20 minutes is definitely not enough! Try a few hours (8 -10) instead. So it's not just Steam after all. Hm. After running memtest for a few hours (8-10) I would recommend to run prime95 for about the same time (8-10 hours).
