What's causing my computer to hard freeze?

[rcxAsh]

Wasn't sure what section to ask this under, but I thought that I'd ask it here (I don't think it's a gaming problem, because it doesn't seem to be specific to one game). Before I start, my processor is an Intel Celeron (Coppermine) advertised as being 800MHz. My video card is an XFX GeForce4 MX440SE 64MB DDR; PCI version.

The other day, a friend was over and was playing Enemy Territory on my computer. Not more than 10 minutes into the game (heck, maybe not even five), it froze. And my speakers were emitting a quiet, but high pitched buzzing/whistling sound.

This isn't the first time it's happened to me in Linux, so I just reboot and let him play the game in Windows instead. And.. the same thing happened.

Ok, must be an Enemy Territory problem I thought.

But today, back in Linux, I was playing WarCraft III: Frozen Throne. I think that I only got through 1 game out of 3 or 4. All the other times, hard freeze. Each time with a high pitched whistling coming from the speakers (the last time I played today, it was quite loud as well).

Um, so I'm quite lost as to what's happening. Looking through these forums a bit, most people seem to attribute such problems to heat issues. However, my system seems to peak at around 50C. (lm_sensors is broken, but a slightly uncalibrated gkrellm reports around 50C+ as the highest. Immediately after rebooting from a freeze, the BIOS reports just under 50C.

Reading a thread about average CPU temperatures, this doesn't sound very high at all.

However, if I'm compiling something and the CPU temperature goes around 50C, nothing bad happens. I can even watch videos with mplayer while I'm waiting, and everything works great.

So, am I really overheating? Or maybe, is just the video card overheating? The video card comes with its own fan and heatsink, but for the first hour or so of my computer being on, the video card's fan is really, very loud. Sometimes making uneven and/or rythmic "grinding" sounds.

Does that sound like a possibilty?

Or, another thing that I read around the forums is that things like this could be due to a weak powersupply.

Since I did not build my computer myself, I'm not sure about what kind of powersupply it has. Looking at it, it says 235W, and has some text on it that says, "+5V & +3.3V Total output power can't exceed 125W"

Other things in my computer.. a PCI NIC, a SoundBlaster16 PCI, [video card], onboard i810 video chip, cd-writer, two harddrives, 3.5 floppy drive, plus all the other things you'd expect such as USB, etc.

I don't know terribly much about hardware. But does anyone think that my computer is overheating, or that it's just not receiving enough power? My room is the warmest room in the house. So, I don't know if that would affect it. But 50C doesn't sound that high compared to others' temperatures.

Oh, and in addition, when my box hard froze, I could not ssh into it, nor could I ping it.

Or, is there anything bad that I may have put into my kernel you think?

I'm currently recompiling my kernel with the magic sysrq thing. So the next time it freezes, I'll see if that still responds or not.

Any reply is welcomed.
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rcxAsh

[blaster999]

The most possible cause is the video card. Double check its fan - is it working properly? All the fans somtimes get bOrked, and you can't tell when. The best idea is to borrow someon else's video card and check wether your system freezes while gaming.
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[rcxAsh]

Hey, thanks for the reply. I checked the video card's fan, and it's still running. However, there was a lot of dust on it, and I read elsewhere that cleaning off the dust was a solution for someone else. So I did that too.

I then tried running WarCraft III again, but this time with the side of the case off. I tried playing two games, and so far, nothing bad yet.

Is there anyway for me to monitor the temperature of my video card with lm_sensors or something? Or... maybe my particular video card is not equipped with a sensor? But I know that my video card does get hot. When I removed it to clean it, I could feel the heat.

Looking at gkrellm, the temperature that it tells me (not sure if it's the system or the CPU) seems to be lower than it was before. So, maybe cleaning the dust and removing the case helped..

Also, I remember reading somewhere around these forums about nVidia having some issues with 4K stacks vs 8K stacks. My kernel currently has the 4K stack option unchecked. This is okay? (IIRC, this was fixed in the latest drivers. I'm still using the slightly older 6106 version)
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rcxAsh

[blaster999]

Glad to help.
AFAIK, 4k stacks were meant to reduce the memory occupied by the kernel. There is no reason to use it however because it doesn't save much RAM but breaks binary-only module compatibility (such as ATI and NVIDIA drivers). It is a good idea to uncheck 4k stacks.
_________________
60s: sex, drugs, rock'n'roll
90s: sux, bugs, drag'n'drop
---
Some multimedia keys refuse to work? See my mini-howto:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1896734#1896734