Hello, My system specs are: Pentium 4 2.6 GHZ w/ Hyperthreading MOBO Asus P4C800 Deluxe 1 GB RAM (2 512MB DDR400 modules) Video card: MSI GeForce4 Ti4200 Except for the video card, the whole system is new (I assembled it on Monday) I have the latest BIOS and NVIDIA drivers updates Here is what's happening: I have been experiencing some bizarre video problems when playing graphic-intensive games. On one moment I am playing, and suddenly the screen goes CRAZY! I mean REAL CRAZY! It starts showing bizarre images, very similar to those TV signal interference patterns. Sometimes the screen turns white, with equally-spaced yellow rectangles on top of it. Very surreal! Sometimes the OS hangs too, sometimes it does not. Anyway, in both cases I have to reboot. I have experienced this playing Aquanox, under WIndows XP and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, under Linux, so this is not an OS-related issue. What could be causing this? Overheating immediately came to my mind. But what? Asusprobe is reporting normal temperatures for the CPU, even under load (it never goes beyond 52C). Anyway, I tested the CPU hypothesis by running Seti@Home for hours, and nothing happened. Video card? I have had this video card for more than a year (its former computer was a Pentium III 800). Why would it be overheating now? The North Bridge? I thought so, because the heatsink was getting very hot indeed. I tried attaching a fan to it, but the prloblem didn't go away. I performed the classic test: to have a big fan blowing directly into the case, and that appearantly solved it! I still have to make more tests in order to obtain some conclusions, but it seems SOMETHING is overheating, I just dont know what! Ah, yes, my case is well refrigerated (I have two case fans) and so is my hard-disk. Do you guys have any idea of what could be causing this? Thanks!

From your description of the problem and the troubleshooting that you have done, my guess would be RAM. I've never run into a RAM overheating problem myself, but it seems like the most logical cause to me.

One correction: I repeated the tests with Seti@Home (running it for hours) and, without a fan blowing right into the case, it locks the machine up after aproximatelly 50 minutes I started it. I tried touching the RAM chips with my fingers, but I didn't seem hot. I also tested all my memory with memtest86 and it didn't report any errors. I think I have proved that the problem is overheating, but I cant seem do identify WHAT component is overheating.... Is it possible that Asusprobe and/or the BIOS are making incorrect readings of the CPU temperature? What can I do to measure it accuratelly? Thanks!