Member Avatar for Alex Edwards

My computer keeps restarting whenever I do something like view a stream-video or also do something else that is video related, i.e. playing Warcraft 3 FT.

Sure it can perform fine doing either task (for about 5 minutes) but then the computer just shuts off without warning!

Now at first I thought it was a hardware issue, but it's odd... I can leave the computer on for hours on end and it wont automatically shut off. Only if it's doing one of the 2 tasks mentioned above!

The only thing I can think of is that maybe the processor can't handle doing the extra work of video streaming? Is it possible that the Video driver is causing the CPU to heat up and in turn is causing the computer to shut down??

sorry, I don't know too much about hardware so I can only make these assumptions @_@

Any help would be appreciated! =)

-Alex

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Member Avatar for caperjack

sound like the video card is overheating and causing you problems maybe ,make use the fan on the video card is working ,assuming you have a video card and not onboard video ,also make sure all hardware is clear of dust buildup

Member Avatar for OlyComputers

I'm assuming you don't receive a BSOD (blue-screen-of-death) when this happens and it just shuts down.

It sounds like an insufficient power supply, I've had this problem before when my power supply wasn't able to handle my video card running at full load.

Video cards and CPU's are the two components of a computer where you will see a substantial difference in power usage when they're working hard vs. just working (I know there's more of a difference in HDDs from idle to usage, but it's an on vs. off where GPU and CPU are more about light load vs heavy load). My old computer had a PSU that was failing and it would reboot when I tried to play games because the PSU would become overloaded and fail.

Try this PSU calculator http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp to see if your power supply is rated for the equipment you have

*note: over time PSUs degrade, if you bought a 400w power supply 5 years ago it could very easily peak at 300-350 now, and sometimes they go even faster. I had a year old 420W supply in a system that shouldn't have peaked over 250 and it was overloading.

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