Problem with PC while Gaming

kinkstr

Im having a very irritating problem while playing games on my new pc, the PC was built yesterday and last night while playing Call of Duty the monitor switched off by itself and would not turn back on leaving a "hit the reset button scenario", it happened again tonight when i played Half Life 2, i was playing the game for 5 minutes when it happened, which i thought was strange as it didnt happen until after atleast an hour and a half into Call of Duty

My Spec is:
AMD 64 3000 s754
Epox 8kda mobo
512mb pc3200 ram
Geforce 5600
fortron 350 watt PSU
Win XP pro

Any help is greatly appreciated

angelofdeath

is it a new monitor?

kinkstr

No the monitor is a few years old and has never had this problem before

angelofdeath

well check loose connections, water damage, stuck buttons etc

does the monitor have its own power cable, or is it run off the psu?

i doubt its a problem with the computer other than its a problem with the 5600

kinkstr

The monitor has its own power cable and there isnt any water damage, i was thinking it was something to do with the graphics card maybe getting a little to hot but then again the problem happened tonite after 5 minutes of game play and the PC had just been turned on 5 minutes prior to this aswell

angelofdeath

have you got onboard graphics? plug into that, and if it works then you know that the problem lies with the 5600 (on a side note, why oh why the 5600, it sucks donkeys)

kinkstr

could it be the refresh rate settings?

angelofdeath

i doubt it, if you specified unsupported refresh rates the monitor would go blank as soon as you enter that mode, ie. as soon as you load the game, check bios settings, particularly powerbios' agp voltage settings

kinkstr

I dont know alot about messing with the bios, im not even sure what i should be looking for

KdjaCL

Turn off your screen saver and idle.

kdjac

angelofdeath

a few things you should try are, turn the hardware acceleration slider down a notch, reseat the gfx card, reset the bios, check your gpu temps, turn off fastwrites or set the agp speed to 4x

try as many of these as you can to troubleshoot it

kinkstr

KdjaC wrote:

Turn off your screen saver and idle.

kdjac

i set my screen saver not to come on for 200 minutes, i could'nt see "idle"

i havent slept in the last 24 hours so i dont think i should do messing with the bios tonight

How do i change the "idle" settings?

TacT

Just try disable it altogether and disable any power saving too -- see if that cures it. if not you might want to try reseating your card? Did you check to see nothing could be shorting anywhere?

kinkstr

How could i check that something has been shorted, the mobo has nforce3 but i hadnt installed the drivers until 5 minutes ago, could that have anything to do with it?