Computer Freezes When Playing Games

David S said:

Hey 7Forums,

After my last graphics card has died on me (HD6850), I have been able to borrow a friends GFX Card (HD5770) and have been having a strange problem - this problem is not unique to my computer, it also was happening in his computer when using the same GFX Card.

Right on to the problem:

1. What happens is that the computer will be running just fine, until I open a game.
2. After opening a game it will run perfectly but then every minute of so it will freeze the whole computer for maybe 5-10 seconds. Whilst doing this the sound of hardware being removing and reinserting will play (the same sound that happens if you was to unplug and re insert a usb stick)
3. And then this will persist as long as I have the game open, closing the game makes the problem go away.
4. This has only been happening since using this GFX card, and want to know if these is anyway of fixing it.

Thanks in advance,
Dave.

First of all, Hi
1. Are your video drivers up to date?
2. Are you using any DVI to VGA (or what ever) adapter?
3. Did you run a stress test with Furmark or any other software?
4. happy New Year!!!

David S said:

Hey, thanks for the reply :)

Here are the answers for your questions:

1. Yes all the drivers for the card are up to date.
2. I do have to use an adapter yes as the card only allows DVI (and my monitor is to old for that ).
3. I ran a test and it did the same thing as a normal game, the mas temp was around 57, and the fan speed didn't go past 40%
4. Happy New Year to you to :)

To elaborate more on the problem, it seems to occur when I have more than 2 tabs open in firefox to/ to many windows open.
Also the screen doesn't go blank either, it just lags a huge amount then the image freezes and then carries on like normal after 5 seconds or so

1. Check out your screen refresh rate and post a snip (start>type "snipping tool")
2. Does the pc make any weird sounds while the screen is frozen???
3. Check out your temperatures with CPUID HWmonitor and post back with a snip again
4. Clean your PC coolers and fans from dust (I highly recommend you to do that outside and with a compressor, if possible)

Hi DavidS, do you get any error message when your PC freeze? like "display drivers have stopped responding"...if so, try to run the PC with just one RAM stick and see if that resolves the issue. If it does then run a memtest overnite. So, that it can detect for any errors on the memory.

Let us know of the outcome.