BSOD when running certain games

[Tristeza]

Hey guys.
Been having an issue recently with games randomly causing my system to BSOD and then reboot itself. It only happens during certain games (TF2, Rusty Hearts and most recently Dungeon Defenders) and with some (Namely TF2) simply taking the graphics settings down to minimum fixes it or at least postpones the issue for a while.

I have a nVidia GeForce GT 240 graphics card and 3 gigs of ram, so none of this games should have any problem at all running at max and before I had to do a clean reformat, they didn't. It's not like I'm trying to run Skyrim or BF3 or something.

I have updated all my drivers, checked for problems with diagnostic tools and even done a disk clean and defrag just to make sure, but still no good.

I am running Windows 7 home with Service pack 1 installed and have included some of the most recent dumps from Dungeon Defenders crashes.

Any help of further advice on how to go about this would be great.

EDIT: I should also add, I can do ANYTHING else on this computer without it randomly crashing, it only happens when playing games. I can spend hours watching youtube videos or playing flash/java games and no problems at all. Only happens during gameplay.

 

[Tmagic650]

"EDIT: I should also add, I can do ANYTHING else on this computer without it randomly crashing, it only happens when playing games. I can spend hours watching youtube videos or playing flash/java games and no problems at all. Only happens during gameplay"...

You may simply have to upgrade the video card

 

[Tristeza]

Again though, these games (minus DD of course as I only got it recently) worked fine before. No problems what so ever, even some more graphically intensive games like Call of Duty Black Ops run fine, still do.

 

[Tmagic650]

Did you get the graphics driver from Nvidia's support website or from some other source?

 

[Tristeza]

From nVidia's website. Windows was trying to tell me that it was already up to date but the nVidia site has a newer version. I thought that the drivers would have been the issue myself but it hasn't helped.

 

[Tmagic650]

Is the inside of the computer clean with all the fans clean and running normally?

 

[Tristeza]

Everything is clean, and memtest found no problems. (Ran for 8 hours, 7 cycles)

 

[Tmagic650]

What are you using for virus and other malware control?

 

[Circuit]

Is the inside of the computer clean with all the fans clean and running normally?

I'm thinking along the same line. To me it sounds like a heating issue. You tube, java games, etc... don't require any heavy lifting. Graphic based games on the other hand do. Easy enough to find out. Take the side off your case and have a small fan blow onto your graphics card and mainboard, while playing a game. If no crash..you have a heating issue. One thing to make sure is that there is adequate space around your graphics card for cooling. Also make sure the card below your graphics card is not a major heat generator, like a physx card or something.

 

[Tristeza]

I'm running Avast, Spybot and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. All of which have found nothing.

As for the overheating issue, I'll take the side off and have a look around again, but I dunno if it can be that, some far more graphically intense games still run fine. Maybe I just got lucky at the times I ran those? I'll give it a go anyway, see what comes up.