Random Restarts

[Salatheon]

I had this problem on my old PC where playing certain games (mostly newer games) would cause my PC to shutdown or restart, the temps were fine, and it had been reformatted etc. So I assumed my OC was a little dodgy, but even going back to stock it done it every now and then, eventually it basically went away by itself, and then came back, I got used to it..

Few weeks ago I upgraded my video card from GTX 275 to a GTX 570, and it started shutting down again, so I was thinking the power supply (Thermaltake TP 750watt). Then about a week ago I done a full upgrade to an i5 2500k, Asus P67 Pro, 8Gb DDR3 etc..

Now it has started shutting down on me again, and the only things that are common with the old and the new PC, are:

Power supply (Thermaltake TP 750watt)
DVD Burner
1TB Western Digital HDD (storage, got SSD for Windows)
Case

So I took the power supply apart and cleaned it out, was full of dust, and I have it running outside of the case now to keep it cool to see if it might have been overheating.

Can anyone offer any suggestions as to what it could be? I know it's kinda gotta be the power supply, because I mean what else could it be, right?

 

[daniel49]

I would get a digital multimeter and check the voltages that your power supply is putting out.
http://www.devhardware.com/forums/p...a-multimeter-how-to-use-it-to-test-75111.html if you need help.

 

[Salatheon]

Got a multimeter and checked all the outputs on the ATX motherboard power connector, all are fine.. well perfect in fact, I also checked the 5v and 12v output at a molex with system at idle and under load and they are fine.

At the moment nothing is overclocked, and it restarted while I was browsing an hour ago.

I have also updated the BIOS for the motherboard to no avail. I am going to test a different video card now, after that what else should I try? Thanks

 

[dbailey]

Random restarts are usually due to bad ram. Download Memtest and see if it comes up with any errors.

 

[Salatheon]

I tried some other RAM I had, and the PC done the same thing, crashed in about 5mins in Starcraft 2, multiple times. So I checked BIOS settings and tried a few things like timings, voltage etc, nothing worked.

So I put my RAM back in and tried my old GTX 260 graphics card and successfully played a whole game of Starcraft 2, about 40mins or so. So I am thinking bad RAM on the card, so I put my 570 back in and just ran 500 iterations of "MemtestG80", the graphics card memory test and it didn't have a problem..

I still think it is graphics card related, but dunno where to go from here. I'm gonna put the 260 back in a see if I can get it to crash, if not it must be the 570.