Having big problem with new system crashing

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24 Jul 2005
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484
I just received my Ultima Rampage 280 OC system from Overclockers today.

I am having massive trouble with it whenever it launches a game. It seems to crash the entire system into a reboot within minutes of play if I am lucky. I'd assume that something or many things are overheating. I tried Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2 so far. Both of them are hardly the BEST graphical games out so I don't see why they would cause this overheat, or does any game when using high graphics settings cause an overheat?

The OS is Vista Home Premium 64bit. Overclockers for some reason sent me the system overclocked, which I didn't want. They clocked the quad cores from 3ghz to 3.6ghz. I can't even tell if they have overclocked the memory etc. because I don't have enough experience with overclocking. I went in the BIOS and changed some of the stuff from manual to AUTO which seems to have brought the CPU cores back to 3.1ghz.

The Geforce 280 card in this machine seems to get very hot, I haven't run a temperature software to gauge exactly how hot yet, but if I open the case soon after one of these crashes and touch it, it is scorching.

I also purchased a Xonar D2X sound card which fits into a PCI-E slot. the only free slot was direcetly beneath the graphics card and the space between the two is literally 1-2mm. Could this close proximity be causing the graphics card to overheat to the point of crashing?

The case is a Coolermaster RC1000 and there seems to be enough fans going on in there.

I guess the weather is pretty hot and humid too atm, but surely if I buy a PC for £2240, it should be able to withstand a bit of warm weather?
 
without knowing your temps its hard to put it down to a heat issue. download 'Everest free' and post your temps idle and load.
 
all four CPU cores are around 50 degrees at rest, and the GPU is at around 55-58 degrees at rest. When under load the GPU swiftly climbs to 105 degrees and steadies arounjd the 104-5 mark. Sometimes going to 108.

When a game crashes is is an abrupt crash and i have to hit reset on the tower. Rang up tech support about six times today step by step trying different things to figure out what the problem is. Running temperature monitors, and 3dmark Vantage and this other gfx demo. I hit the CMOS switch on the mobo to default the CPU back to stock speeds. The most obvious choice seems to be the GPU overheating. I am not positive though.

My Asus Xonar soundcard requires a dongle connection from the PSU, and the PSU suplied is only 650w, so maybe that coupled with the 280 GPU might be requiring that little bit too much power causing a crash?

Maybe there is a problem with one of the RAM sticks?

I have Crysis arriving either tomorrow or the day after in the post. I wanted to test that before arranging for Overclockers to collect my system for mending which will probably happen on Monday.

On a side note, the Ultima Rampage 280 OC is clearly advertised as coming with
"Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-8500C5 TwinX (2x2GB) Supplied with Airflow Fan"

...this is listed as out of stock on the website and there seems to be some Geil RAM installed instead, which I am assuming is inferior in specification to that particular Corsair. Surely they have to replace this with the appropriately advertised RAM when they get it back in stock if I ask them to?
 
I received Crysis today, installed and patched it to 1.2. The game crashes the system within about 2 minutes. It doesn't even get past the initial mission briefing on the helicopter at night.

I ran the Crysis benchmark tool as few times too at different settings. Eventually that got too hot too and crashed. Temps were as high as 109 degrees on the GPU when coming out of the benchmark loops.
 
Contact the shop - somethings definitely not right with it.

If you've spent that much on a pc and it doesn't work properly, I'd send it back to be honest but that's just my two cents.
 
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