Computer Troubleshooting Help Needed

My son has an older gaming PC that is not acting right. It runs fine when he's browsing the internet, watching videos, playing Minecraft and Portal 2. But when he plays other games, like Guild Wars 2, it will play for a few minutes and then totally lock-up. It completely freezes and I can't do anything other than a hard restart.

The only other clue I have is, when he goes to play Guild Wars, the game flips about 6 times between the black screen of it loading and the desktop. Then begins running. That doesn't happen on my machine or my wife's machine.

I just tried a full reinstall of Windows (wiped everything clean) and only reinstalled GW2. It still happens. I tried setting it to write a minidump and crashed it a few times (before I reinstalled windows), but it never wrote anything to the folder.

Any suggestions to trace down the origin of this issue?

What's CPU temp looking like during those functional usage periods vs when it crashes?

What about GPU/video card?

Sounds like either a temp issue or something with a more intensive graphical usage.

ETA: If temp from CPU, might need to reapply thermal paste;

Temp seems fine. Looks like it doesn't go much above 75 C.

How do I isolate a graphics card issue? Any way to test for that?

Graphics, you can try lowering the resolution and seeing if it cleans up out but ultimately that just sounds like a weak or possibly dying graphics card or onboard if the video is embeded. You can try to see if the have a new driver out for your video or upgrading Direct X too.

If you have an onboard and a card as well, you can go into BIOS and choose the onboard only (or should be able to) and see what it does.

If it's just onboard... it's likely in the process of being hosed.

Thanks all. Yeah, it's got a GPU. I will have to see if it has onboard as well and give it a try. I will also bottom out all the graphics settings and try that too.

With the screen issue you describe, black to loading to black, etc. Sounds like the Graphics Card has died, like others are saying.

-John

He wanted a graphics upgrade anyway, so I will get a new card and make a young boy happy.

Thanks so much for all the advice.

Just make sure everything is compatible.