Hey guys, I'm having a problem with my new comp that I built. Everything was running great til about 2 or 3 months later. Now when I play games whether online or not, my framerate fluctuates from 64 down to about 20 and back and forth. Also now my comp is restarting after about 5 to 10 minutes of playing WoW. I have an AMD Anthlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+, 2 1Gb sticks of Corsair DDR2 Ram, and an NVidia GEForce 7600 GS. If anybody can suggest anything it would be most apprecitated. Like I said WoW ran smoothly for about 3 months until the framerate problem started and now the restarting just started. I just upgraded to 2gigs of Ram and did a memory check on them and they passed. Thanks - J

Firs thing I would check is dust and garbage causing overheating. It's had to imagine you would have a dust problem with a new computer yet, but its worth a check. A quick, down & dirty method is to remove the side and place a fan blowing in. If the restarts stop or are less frequent, that is an indication of overheating. Next, what wattage power supply did you install? Third, run Memtest 86+ on your memory sticks one at a time. Download the ISO and burn to a CD and boot from it, and let it run at least 2 hours on each stick, longer if you have time. Even one error message means that stick is bad.

Hi, thanks for the reply. I check for and clean the dust out regularly, and there is nothing in the way of the 4 fans that are on the system. The Graphics card fan DID however stop working. Would that be the cause of the system restarts, which are happening at random periods without any warnings what so ever. I ran a test on the Memory already and found no errors. The other possiblity I found is that when I ran a Voltage test on my power supply, the -12v was at 1.2V and the -5V was running at -8V.... I don't know if this is normal but it doens't look normal to me. Is it normal, or is that the problem that needs to be fixed? Thanks again -J

Absolutely and overheating video card can cause crashes!! If the fan failed, you can find replacement fans, try Newegg or a good, local supply store. Since CompUSA closed down a ton of stores its harder to find a computer supply store. Actually, just find a fan that will fit, it doesn't necessarily have to be the exact fan for that card!

Far as your PS goes, I would put that at a strong possibility also. I am not good at reading or interpreting line voltages, may be Jim here at SAF can help out there.

Thanks again. I am in the process of replacing the graphics card. What surprised me even more is that I was in the BIOS and it rebooted on me, am really thinking it was more of a PS problem, and the Framerate problem I was having was a graphics card issue with the fan not working. I am hoping by replacing these two items my problem will be solved, if not then only other thing I can think of is a Windows Boot/HD problem and in which case will upgrade to Vista. Thanks agian for your help ^.^

Also, check TweakGuides for help:

• System Optimization Tweak Guides
• Tweaking Companion
• Game Tweak Guides

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