I have been having trouble playing games lately. After a few minutes of playing the screen goes black and the sound starts to loop. I think that heat may be my problem but heres my info.

PC Specs:

OS: Microsoft Windows XP
Professional
Version 2002
Service Pack 2

Processor: AMD Athlon ™ 64 Processor
3200+
2.20 GHz, 1.00 GB of RAM

Video Card: Radeon 9800 XT

MB: ASUSTeK K8VSEDX

Memory: x2 512MB

CPU Temp: 55C/131F (Idle speeds)
Sys Tem: 49C/121F (Idle speeds)


If anyone has any advice for me, I would greatly appretiate it

I doubt its heat at those temperatures, please click the following link to go to my thread: i have a very similar problem to you.

See the list of things i've tried, they might work for you, or you might want to have a look at the power supply like i am doing:

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic41228.html

I haven't mentioned it but i sometimes alse get the looping sound problem as wel

It CAN be a overheating problem. You didn't mention your temps on LOAD. 55C for the CPU on IDLE is high!!! Monitor your temps while playing and if they go above 65-70C, than it might be the problem. Check as well your Video Card temps and verify that it doesn't reach temps above 80C.

Keep updating us.

Your CPU and System temps are way to high,I have a 3200+ Venice,it's idling at 30C and the System at 28C.Take the sides off the case and see if those temps drop.

a 55c idle temp is on the high end.
did yo build this PC? if so, do apply thermal paste correctly?

Make sure your temps are accurate as well
Go into your bios and look at the temps in there, some programs can conlfict with your sensors, and provide a bad reading.

Yeah, AtK SpAdE is right. Even if it's not you who asssembled the PC, it might be that the thermal paste is not applied corrected to the CPU. Try to see if you can remove the CPU Heatasink to verify that and re-apply a new layer of Thermal Paste.

heat is always a concern....all motherboards have FSM (fail safe mechanism) to automatically shutdown when CPU temp reaches 100 degrees Celcius, but you haven't gotten there yet...55 idle is high...so you're going at 70 or 80 during intense computing i suppose...easiest thing to do is disk defragment and disk cleanup....when you say 'lately' you mean that the troubles have just started right? so it probably isn't heating problems...maybe a registry cleaner might help too.

Ok, so here is a little bit of an update on my situation. I didn't mention before that I have sent my computer back the manufacturer twice in the past two years to be fixed. First time the Motherboard was fried and the second time the power supply was faulty. It was under warrenty then but it ran out so I cannot send it back. It worked great for the past 6 months

Now, yes it recently started messing up within the past month or so. It started only when I played WoW, and every other game was fine. Then the rest soon followed. (I started to believe that is was my video card because when I watch movies in quicktime became very very poor when they were excellent before)

Since the last time I posted I ran a few memtests and one of them said that there was an error somewhere. But the other memtests turned out fine. I have taken off my side covers on the case and things are working pretty good for now, temps are down to 45C at idle now, which is better. Also I am able to play games. Im hoping that this is not just a temporary solution to the problem and it works for a long time.

If it works fine with the cover removed but crashes without, then it most likely is the heat. Your CPU temp seems WAY too high for an AMD. My Athlon 64 3000+ Venice idles at (28-31C depending on room temp) and heats up to 40C under extreme load (WoW, WMP10, iTunes). You might want to consider getting yourself an aftermarket CPU fan, they do much better jobs than stock ones. And while you're at it, get some ArcticSilver thermal gel.

By the way, you don't want to keep your case open for a long time. Dust will get trapped all over your parts which will heat it up the entire system even more.