Enchantermon on 16/4/2011 at 18:40

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First, the specs:

OS: XP Home 32-bit
Motherboard: MSI785GTM-E45 (MS-7549)
CPU: 2.50 GHz AMD Phenom 9850 quad-core
GPU: nVidia GeForce 210
RAM: 4GB (2GB x2) Corsair 800 MHz DDR2

Okay, this is a new one. So near the end of last year the PSU in my parent's computer died (some of you may remember that thread), so I got them a new computer to replace the aging one, and it's been working wonderfully. Yesterday, I decided to see how that rig would handle some games (since it's far more powerful than my laptop), so I installed Steam and threw Half-Life 2 on there. Most of the graphics settings I left at the "recommended for your machine" level, only bumping up a couple, and started to play. I got as far as stepping out onto the platform where your train stops (so, the intro and about a minute of player-controlled play). Then the screen went black, and the sound stuttered for about 10 seconds, and the computer rebooted. As it went through POST, right before loading Windows it gave me this: "Hyper Transport Sync Flood error occurred on last boot."

I poked around on Google and found that lots of people had encountered this problem. The only difference is that it seemed everyone who had it was overclocking their system. I hadn't touched anything related to overclocking; I don't know much about it and I doubt the machine cools well enough for it, anyway. But I still ran through a couple of items, namely updating the BIOS, turning Cool n' Quiet (a CPU power-saving mechanism) off and checking the voltage of my RAM (which was at the recommended level). HPET was already disabled, as per another suggestion. I went back to the game and turned all of the graphics settings to their default recommended values and still the error occurred, but this time I was able to get a little farther; as far as the turnstile gate immediately after the train platform (where the woman waits for her husband). Then the same thing occurred.

I'm thinking that it might be a temperature problem; while the CPU sits at about 50 C during a normal load (just internet browsing) the graphics card is running pretty hot (75 C) at the same time. But perhaps graphics cards handle heat better than CPUs? The motherboard is comfortable too; only 34 C. But when I run the game, even with most settings cranked down a notch below the recommended, while the CPU only hits 56 C, GPU temps jump to 107 C at play time, two degrees above nVidia's recommended max temp. Incidentally, the game still crashed even with the lowered settings.

The only hole in the temp theory is that the CPU is still pretty cool, and reports on-line link this problem to the CPU/motherboard rather than the GPU. This doesn't mean, of course, that the GPU couldn't cause the same problem, but it makes me suspicious all the same.

Even though the computer runs fine when I'm not trying to play HL2, I'm worried that this could become a problem in the future, even without playing games, so I wanted to fish for suggestions. Am I correct in thinking that this is likely a temperature problem? Or should I be looking elsewhere? If so, where? Thanks in advance.