Video issues?

[10sun]

Not sure if I posted about this here in the past or not.

When I play games full screened, it'll run fine for a while (up to an hour, but sometimes it only takes 1 minute) and then artifacts will start appearing on screen & shortly thereafter, my entire PC locks up. When the PC locks up, it plays the last note that was going through the soundcard at the time & eventually my monitor says that it is no longer receiving a signal. I have to manually hit the power button to restart.

Due to the lockup, I cannot take screenshots, nor does my system record this in the logs.

This only happens while playing full screen and has only started happening in the past 4 months.

Normally this isn't a big deal at all because 90% of all games I play are windowed. However, I cannot play games such as Starcraft due to this.

I have tried it out with several games such as Counterstrike: Source & WarCraft 3, windowed it works fine and I can play as long as I'd like, but full screen it crashes.

Anybody have any ideas?
I have the latest Catalyst drivers running & I've updated every time a new set comes out.

My system = Athlon 64 3000+, 2gb Corsair ram, 2x 74gb Raptors running RAID-0, ATI X850Pro, & a 375w PSU.

-Adam

[Arlos]

Honestly, try removing your sound card and see if you get the same problem. If it's a built-in model, disable it. One of my old systems would get random lockups frequently, but with no seeming pattern to them, and it turned out it was my sound card. Why it would only happen full-screen, I am not sure, though.

If it's not the sound card, video card would be the obvious 2nd suspect.

-Arlos

[Harrison]

Try underclocking it, or checking its temperature while running idle and then under load.

[10sun]

Well, I did what I should have done a while back. I opened up my case and blew out all the dust. There was enough stuck in the cooling unit on my video card to block all the air flow.

When I was reading the temperature readouts, I assumed they were in Fahrenheit because they were running around 100-130 degrees. Lets just say I am a dumbass.

Still not sure why it was only in fullscreen modes though. That part doesn't quite make sense?