calculatedChaos Gaming

Yesterday (Monday) I was playing TF2 quite normally and then suddenly my FPS just crashed and locked at 1 FPS!!!! TF2 was exceptionally slow to disconnect and even when it had it was also very slow to quit. Is this a problem with my CPU or my GPU?? A while afterwards I cleared teh Max/Min temps on the CPUID HW Monitor and tried again, but as soon as I tried to do anything in game, such as change video settings to lower the load on my GPU it crashed. I used to be able to watch full HD (1920x1080) videos on my 1280x1024 DVI screen up until a while ago when I foolishly updated the drivers and didnt do an immediate restart, but what came out of that was I was forced to roll back the driver and since then I have not been able to watch HD vids, even 1280x720 vids are now struggling sometimes.

After I updated & rolled back my GPU card drivers I had OC'd my CPU using the mobos Dynamic Overclocking and that caused a system crash frequently so I turned it off. I have a feeling that I severly shortened the life of the CPU. But since all these problems I have been noticing that the problem is getting gradually worse.

Hardware I have (which I hope to upgrade this year sometime if I get the money): Mobo: MSI 848p Neo-V (I have pdf manual if anyone wants), Intel P4 2.66GHz 478 socket, eVGA NVIDIA 7600GT AGP 8x (which btw reports temperatures of 60C idle and anywhere from 90-100C during TF2, has stock cooler on it, going to at some point replace compound with silver stuff), Trust 420W PSU, 2 160Gb Samsung HDDs and 2Gb DDR 250MHz (I think).

I am thinking on this for upgrading what I have: mobo: either any one tht takes core 2 or NVIDIAs nForce 780i, possibly a 9800GTX+ or an ATI 4890. I was also thinking on upgrading the case to an Antec 900 but it depends on if I have the money. I will obv need a new PSU and I would accept recomendations for all of these (note that the Antec has the PSU at the bottom & my current case has it at the top). I'll get around to putting up a screenshot of temps for the PC.

If your GPU runs that hot I would imagine that this is a problem with your GPU getting too hot. All of this shit happens to me when my box gets too hot. It's why I can't play L4D

Well even tho it is reporting that temperature I have no corruption or any distortion on the screen of any kind. Plus I have 3 system fans constantly replenishing the air inside. I'm clueless as to why its stopping working. The HD video problem seemed to be very sudden.

Why aren't you using PCI-E?

does your mobo have onboard video? if not do you have another videocard you can try in it? if it has onboard video, disable the graphics card in device manager and then shut down, take your videocard out reboot to the onboard video, then shut down again, reboot and manually install the drivers for the videocard.

to me it sounds like a hardware issue. something must of when bad from the over heating. try to clean out your system (using a blow duster thingy) and reinstall your drivers. if that doesnt work try to move the video card to a different slot. one of my old pci slots on my parents computer went out (it was a nvidia 6200 LOL)and it seems like it fixed it.

Its an AGP 8x NVIDIA 7600 and there is only ever 1 AGP slot on an AGP mobo. It is perfectly clean, last time I blew my computer out with an air compressor I managed to stop the system temp on the mobo working. I had a 6200 without a fan before I got the 7600, and its idle temp was 60C got hot enough to burn your fingers after playing a game tho so my dad put some fans blowing air at it in and it seemed to keep it cooler, but even then I had no video problems. Idle temp for the 7600 is about 63C or so, going up to about 96-100C during TF2. Just going to try running TF2 now and see what happens.