Possible cause of pc games crashing?

[Westender]

Not a gamer myself but when the kids play games on one of our pc's they often crash. Just wondered what the most likely cause might be. I had the pc checked out by someone a while ago but they couldn't find anything particularly wrong after doing a number of tests. They removed a couple of software programmes suggesting a possible conflict problem but the games still crash. One of the software programmes they deleted was an MSI motherboard programme that displayed the pc temp - which often reached the high 70's under load. I personally think the pc might be overheating but the company who undertook the checks said Pentium 4's could reach high temps without crashing. PC spec is 2.8 P4, 1024 ram, Radeon 9500 Pro.

[Mr Snatcher]

Well, your specs are fine, but 70 degrees in awful hot. Is the p4 the prescott version? The video card maybe running hot as well. How many case fans do you have in there?

[Westender]

Not sure what version the P4 is. I have two case fans one at the front and one at the back. I did suggest adding a better heatsink and fan when the company looked at the problem previously but they said it would invalidate any warranty with intel on the P4. They said they added some Arctic Silver at that time but I'm not convinced this has reduced the cpu temps.