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recently, my monitor has been flickering and then the whole computer freezes and/or the monitor just shuts off [with a soundloop of the last sound in game]

before i could play HL2, but now i cant even play Counter-Strike without this problem occuring. i used to run CS at 85 fps before but now i'm forced to run it at 60 fps because of the flickering/freezing. It still freezes at 60 fps sometimes. I tried to play Lineage II. . .same result.

i suspect that this may be overheating or my outdated hardware, but i'm not sure what to upgrade

according to EVEREST Home Edition:
OS: Win2000 Pro
CPU: Intel Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz
VGA: GeForce FX 5200 [128 MB, AGP 8x]
Memory: 512 MB [two 256MB DDR SDRAM]

Temperatures
Motherboard: 38 °C (100 °F)
CPU: 48 °C (118 °F) it goes as high as 122°F in games
Aux: 31 °C (88 °F)

is there any other info i need to provide ? what about the PSU ? [and how would i find this info?]

i only have 1 fan and it's used to cool the CPU, the video card does not have a fan, it only has a heat sink that gets really really hot. . .i touched it and could not keep my finger there for more than 2 seconds literally. I tried opening the case with a fan blowing into it. this seems to help a bit but my computer ends up freezing anyways.

i have already updated the drivers for my video card. i haven't tried to overclock anything.

Any suggestions to what i should buy ? i got alot of christmas money =) Thanks so much

I have the same problem. I was getting the same thing when I was downloading large files from the internet with the the onboard nic (cheap with lots of cpu usage)
I have temps similar to yours and I have one aditional fan beside the PSU.

I added a small fan that improves the airflow and blows a little air to the RAM since I noticed that the RAM gets really hot.

Adding a decent NIC (thus probably decreasing cpu usage) solved the download problem but my pc freezes during gameplay (actually only Counter Strike)

My CPU runs hot though 52°C at idle.

If anybody has a solution please post it here.