Computer crashes when playing games

[Pavocristatus]

Help please!
When I play a game (eg. R:TW) for more that 7 minutes the monitor goes blank and displays a message saying 'no video input'. Giving the appearance the computer is turned off. Anyone know what's wrong?

Thanks in advance

[Shaun]

Check your temperatures: is your PC overheating?

More info would be nice as well. What are your PC specs? I am willing to bet its over heating. Maybe its your Graphics card that is the problem, however, or maybe even the monitor. If you have a spare monitor, then hook that up and see.

[mrmouth]

It could be a number or things, everything from video card or monitor overheating like Shaun mentioned or even a failing monitor cable or broken pin on either end of the cable itself.

The fact that it happens after 7 minutes is a pretty good indicator that its a heat issue.

Best thing to do would be run a program that will display card temps when playing a game to see if infact the card is running hot to start.

When monitors start to fail its common for them to show signs of eventual failure under stress, i.e. playing a game, although they continue to work well when not under load.

[Spiff]

Does it go blank under any other circumstances? Is it all games or just some, and how long has it been doing this for? Also have you made any recent hardware or driver changes..

[Locky]

Same thing happened to me once. My motherboards capacitors blew. Yours sounds heat related though, because mine would crash at any given time.

When it crashes can you tell whever or not the game is still runing in the background, or does it just stop?

[Pavocristatus]

pc info
Intel pentuim 4
2x 200Gb hard disk
1024 DDR memory (may be only half that though, my motherboard broke and the new one couldn't work with that much memory)
ASUS P5VD-MX (got it about a month 2/3 weeks ago. came with a much quieter fan, the old one sounded like a mini helicopter)
ATi Redeon x600Pro
other stuff

When the screen blanks, the game usually carries on running, the sound keep playing (this happens in TW games), but in others, that I would say are less demanding, it's like the sound's 'jammed' like a broken cd player so my guess is the game isn't really running well. It's been doing this for about 4 weeks. It's hard to tell how long exactly, I just can't be bothered the painfully long process of restarting it.