Graphics Card Crashing during games

[cowdood]

I recently bought a Geforce 8600 GT for my stock eMachines PC (bad i know). The only other upgrade I have put in was 2 1gb sticks of kingston ram.

Ever since I have gotten the card, it has sometimes crashed while playing graphic-intensive games. I will be playing, and everything will glitch out and freeze, and I will have to restart the computer. It has done this with WoW, Half-Life, Star Wars KOTOR, Assassin's creed, and it has even done it while in an iTunes visualizer. It will never do this when just browsing a web page or anything, but only while the graphics card seems to be in use. Sometimes it will do it right when i turn the PC on and load the game, other times it will go an hour or two fine. Anyone know what could be wrong? Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post

 

[_-..zKiLLA..-_]

what are the rest of your specs and what drivers are u on?

 

[cowdood]

AMD sempron 2.1 ghz, 2gb ram, 150gb hd, nvidia geforce 8600 gt.. as for drivers, i have updated twice so they should be the newest, but dxdiag says main driver: nv4_disp.dll version 6.14.0011.7516. If you need more info please tell me how to find it hehe

 

[_-..zKiLLA..-_]

if thats a single core then your bottlenecking, but um i dont know why its crashing. umm lets just see what other people will say

 

[cowdood]

yeah that's another issue but i'll leave it for now... i've heard that the gpu is overheating but ive checked with programs and it seems to be fine..also the fact that it happens at random times no matter how much time ive been using it seems that it isn't over heating. But either way, it's quite a nuisance due to the fact that I get no warning and have to stop what I'm doing and restart. So I'd really like to get this resolved if possible

 

[Neodude1123201]

Is it overclocked at all?

 

[_-..zKiLLA..-_]

um the only thing i would think of doing is just uninstall the drivers and reinstall. maybe a faulty card?

 

[Neodude1123201]

Zkilla just gave me an idea also,What PSU Do you have? tried to to re-seat the card?

 

[JogaBonito1502]

I think it's the heat. My card runs hot by my standards (60C). I run 2 120mm fans (1 intake, 1 exhaust) and I have the heatsink/fan for the CPU (92mm fan). My CPU runs at 25 so it's not heating up the environment. I also have a PCI fan (exhaust) right on top of the video card and then the video card fan. (Could my PCI be blocking some airflow from the video card? I have the CPU fan blowing downwards toward the video card, so I thought it was a good idea to put the PCI to suck that hot air right out). Anyways, I think it's the heat.

 

[_-..zKiLLA..-_]

actually joga if u think about it the cooler your CPU then the more heat coming off the HS so thus more heat in the air