heya, im not brilliant with computer hardware im studying a national diploma in ICT but have yet to do much concerning hardware but my home computer seems to crash after about 15 minutes of playing a game which i can play on my lap top which has about half the spec the PC.

whenever i play a game it will freeze and give me a blue screen never have time to read what it says but i decided to take a look inside the tower unit and my graphics card has two fans of which only one of them is actually spinning at all my graphics card is an asus radeon 9800xt 256mb the rest of the system spec are also high.

i checked on asus smartdoctor and the GPU is running at 70c and the RAM at 60 the tower is next to an open window with good old 3am british wind pooring in and the side panel removed. those temps are what they are on the desktop just browsing the web not whilst in a game. i was wondering if the second fan is suposed to start after a certain amount of time or if it needs to be set or its broken?.

also the case has 2 built in fans for cooling would this be adaquate or would a new case be needed any advice or recomendations would be much appreciated.

cal

Asus dual DDR, S-ATA motherboard
p4 3.4GHz
2gig RAM
256mb radeon 9800xt
550w PSU

I think something is wrong with the second fan. It should be spinning with the first one. 70C is too high for idle or low use. Your card is overheating when you are playing games.

You need to fix/return/exchange/rma the card.

yeh.. tru that.. way hot for something to be idleing in..

try cleaning out your fans and the heatsink grills (hek.. do your whole tower while your at it ) with a compressed air can or something and spin the fan to see if its broken or not..

if it still doesnt spin get it replaced or repaired or something.. before you blow your pc..