computer restarts when playing games

[coopermckay]

My friend just got a brand new alienware with a 600 watt power supply. All was fine when playing the latest games, like battlefield 2 . Now , when he trys to play, his computer restarts. I thought this would be a power issue, but he has a 600 watt silverstone power supply. Another wierd thing is , the computer doesn't restart in all games. Just battlefield 2 , counter-strike source and some other ones. He can play Quake 4 fine and FEAR. I told him to buy a antec or seasonic power supply becuase I know those are good, but he doesn't have a job so he can't. Hes not sure if Alienware will provide him with a new psu . I thought another problem could be hes video card's power wire would be unplugged but i checked and it wasn't. Could it be a cooling problem? His system didn't come with aleinware ice cooling but it has a few fans. ill provide his specs below . Does anyone know what the problem could be?

Alienware -
Silver stone 600 watt psu
Pentium 4 3.2 ghz
1 gb ram ( not sure the speeds DDR 500 i think)
6800 GT
80 gb hard drive

 

[GamerExpress]

I have a question, how mad is he that he spent sooo much money on that machine and it's already having issues. I wouldn't point the blame at the PSU, just yet. What version Nvidia drivers is he using?

 

[Trader05]

From the rebooting issue, i would think it would be either a memory or motherboard issue. Run a memtest for a couple of hours

 

[Malladine]

I blame the intel CPU

Shame on him for buying a brand new system with intel inside. *puke*

 

[natep]

it's probably the faberge eggs that alienware buys w/ the extra money. they may have left one in front of a fan.

on a more serious note, double check the drivers.

 

[acole1]

um you pay 5k+ for a computer AND YOU DONT CALL THE TECH SUPPORT???? get some use out of your friends waisted money.... I'm sure they will quite helpfull.

 

[Trippytiger]

Originally posted by: acole1

um you pay 5k+ for a computer AND YOU DONT CALL THE TECH SUPPORT???? get some use out of your friends waisted money.... I'm sure they will quite helpfull.

QFT. What's the point of getting a prebuilt system if you don't bother calling tech support?

 

[cKGunslinger]

He dropped thousands of dollars on an over-priced, pre-built gaming workstation, but he can't buy a $100 PSU becaue he doesn't have a job? Rich parents?

Regardless, a large chunk of that over-priced system is for warranty and tech-support. Tell him to get at least some of his (parent's) money's worth.

 

[Looney]

Try different drivers. Or call Alienware for tech support. You're paying a premium for a reason.

 

[professor1942]

hahaha alienware

 

[Lasthitlarry]

what a moron...

 

[Fireman]

Originally posted by: Trader05
From the rebooting issue, i would think it would be either a memory or motherboard issue. Run a memtest for a couple of hours

I second this. Many problems like this are RAM related. Memtest is free and sniffed out some bad DDR2 I just bought from Mushkin.

 

[professor1942]

Yeah I just weeded out a bad Samsung DIMM the other day, from now on I wil always test every new module the day I get it, to avoid future headaches...

 

[l Xes l]

Originally posted by: professor1942
hahaha alienware

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

Wow, a "gaming" machine with a 6800GT and P4... Test the memory. If nothing's wrong, call tech support. All that money has to go somewhere.

 

[Finns14]

Ha tell him to trade in the 600w PSU for a decent 450w and put the extra money to a up to date GPU


But my guess would be RAM tell him to run memtest over night

 

[w00t]

umm, maybe you call alienware if he just bought it

 

[piasabird]

could be sound card related. Be surprised what can make a computer crash? P4 is probably overheating. Alienware often overclocks the video card from what I have heard. Might just be spyware junk interrupting or some IM product.

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

It shouldn't be PSU related. A 600W Silverstone is very strong and should be able to handle quite a lot. Check temperatures.

 

[coopermckay]

Its actually a 650 watt power supply, he has the latest nvidia drivers. the 88 series I think, and we have tried older ones so thats not the issue. I opened up his computer yesterday and we tried to take out his 650 silverstone power supply and put in my Antec True Power 2.0 550 watt, and OH man does alienware make it hard. All the wires were zip tied and wrapped around various metal enclosures and stuff. I got down to two wires, but they were connected to the front of the case so we decided to not remove them. I need to convince him to reformat , it probably is adware or something. Im gonna back up his mp3's to dvd then reformat for him see if that helps. Thanks to everyone who was serious about this. People who bashed alienware and pentium 4 ...some people don't know how to build computers, I do, but my 16 year old friend doesn't, as for pentium 4 , I agree its not as good as AMD in games. If I could only describe how large his heatsink is on his cpu, its MORE than adequete cooling. its the size of 10 amd heatsinks. Anyways. Thanks guys.

 

[coopermckay]

The computer costed a little above $3000. and it came with a 15" LCD......Kind of sad, I know. An AMD system could be built for $1000 that was better than this. But his mom had this rich kid who owns like 10 alienwares put it together. They didn't know I knew computer lingo. Oh well sucks for them.

 

[bladefd]

Originally posted by: coopermckay
The computer costed a little above $3000. and it came with a 15" LCD......Kind of sad, I know. An AMD system could be built for $1000 that was better than this. But his mom had this rich kid who owns like 10 alienwares put it together. They didn't know I knew computer lingo. Oh well sucks for them.

wow, for 3000 bucks, you can build a top of the line AMD computer haha..I would never think about buying a pc from alienware or even dell for that matter. Now for the crash, does the pc just restart automatically or does he get a blue screen or something ?

Edit: Tell him to reformat and if the problem still persists, I would contact the alienware people. He paid extra for it and alienware will do something about it. They might ask your friend to send the computer in for them to check out the problem. Maybe he should contact Alienware before he reformats and see what they say. You can probably get more help from alienware than people here.

 

[ForumMaster]

just one last thing, u probablly getting a BSOD (Blue screen of death). it happens when windows encounters a fatal error and cannot continue. Windows XP "thoughtfully" makes the default option an automatic restart which doesn't let u read the error message and google it for answers. so here's what u do. right-click my computer and select properties. then go to the advanced panel, and in the "Startup and recovery" section, click settings. then in the "System failure" section, uncheck "Automatically restart, make it a kernel memory dump and choose a directory like C. then u can probablly post it here and other people can help u analyze it for probs. but do what i said, then turn on bf2 and if it suddnely shows a bluescreen, write down any hexadecimal numbers (numbers containing 0-9 and A-F), and then google the error to find help. best of luck