My friend is building his first home-made computer with my help via phone. We got it working it boots to windows and everythign is dandy, but he says whenever he starts Max Payne 2 or does several things at once the system completely crashes and he has to turn the power supply off for a bit then back on to get it to boot. I've had him place a large floor fan on it to rule out overheating and he does not have it over clocked. I've been having him try several small thing, but nothing seems to work. Any help would be appriciated. AMD Athlon XP Barton 3200+ ATI Radeon 9800 Pro ANTEC TRUEBLUE 480 power supply ASUS A7V600-X VIA KT600 Motherboard
System specs look good, esp the PSU(have the same one), Im thinking RAM or possibly Graphics drivers(if this only happens in games). Ask him to try swapping the RAM between different DIMM slots, try just one stick of RAM etc and see how that goes. Also get him to double check the BIOS and make sure nothing is set above default values. I know you said you have ruled out overheating, but get him to triple check that the heatsink is seated properly.
I had him check the drivers and he said he had the newest ones from ATI. I've had him check all of the BIOS setting and they all seem fine to me. Haven't tried the RAM yet. I'll do that next.
have him try reinstalling the graphics driver. i have an athlon 3200 and a radeon 9800 pro and i run into that exact same problem every once in a while along with a massive drop in performance, and for some reason reinstalling the drivers fixes the problems.
