pc freezing with a cracking sound

I THINK problem in RAM or HDD

but why does it happen only in games it doesnt happen in any other heavy jobs like winrar,.net or while multitasking

GAMES ARE THE MOST HEAVY JOBS AS COMPARED TO WINRAR AND ALL..

I HAD THIS PROBLEM MANY YEARS AGO
when i had P4 1.5 and GEFORCE 4 installed.. and 256 mb ram but i gone away when i took my ram to 512 and geforce 5200FX and i changed my hdd to 80GB

so GAMES TAKE PF AND RAM AND GPU WHICH HEATS UP THE SYSTEM AND THE PROBLEM COMES


CHECK YOUR COOLING ALSO... Monitor your temp.

the problem is about space. you have to free up some space in the partition in which the games are installed and the c drive as well. increase the virtual memory also. this should help you.

i checked the temp i think its my x800xt graphics card
ati tool gave an insane temp of 95+c for gpu and 65c for the board during load
i have 2 80mm fans at the back and 1 80mm fan in the front this heating problem did not happen previously

can the problem be due to my generic 400w psu

what should i do ,i am having to use the comp without the cabinet cover(still max temp reached was 85c for gpu)

yeah its possible and you can switch over to a greater power SMPS

i have abt 900mb free in my c drive and 3gb in the install drive

hey shantanu_webmaster, give me some more concrete help regarding this
problem u typed injus t1 line
i measured the idling temp it was 52c

helpppp

Look your C drive is very low on disk space !!

then your system components take voltage as per usage , that means that according to usage the temp. and power keeps on raising, when this happens then many times the SMPS is not able to provide Adequate power supply and the system crashes..

now other thing is that the power which your SMPS is getting can be a fault!! many times i have seen that PC with or without UPS restarted withour any reason or with a sound and after that everything is ok but it restarts,
after much problems the solution came either to put a UPS OR the systems thst had UPS had the UPS REPAIRED but 40 times in 100 the SMPS was faulty.

so its possible that a 400 watt SMPS is not able to provide you with correct voltage!!

going to other reasons - many times the components are in some jams, means Hdd is got a problem or cpu or mobo but then they are also working correctly on correct voltage!!! SO SMPS IS THE culprit in many cases

thanks for replying i will check out on the suggestions u made

btw what should be the ideal amp on the +12v rail of a good psu for my requirement my present psu has 14a on the +12 rail which i checked on the other treads seem to be low

i am running 2 hdd,2 optical drives,amd 2600+,1 gb ram,x800xt,creative sound card,a7n8x mobo

900 mb in c drive is very low. you need to free up atleast 2gb. the virtual memory of your computer should be more always more than the RAM. the system uses that space for swaping the contents of RAM whenever its needed. most of the time games pull up the need for an virtual memory. when there is insuffiicient space for virtual memory this problem would occur.

i think not so low but ya when you are using that much of hardware then you must have a powerfull SMPS.