Brother's PC Crashes With Most Games

My little brother has an older computer and it works just fine until he goes to play a 3D game. When he begins playing one of his games: Spore, Counter-Strike Source, Assassin's Creed, or Fable (These are the games he listed) the computer will lock up completely and then crash seconds later. The amount of time before the crash varies, but is under two minutes. Once it crashes it will reboot. It DOES NOT display the infamous blue screen. At first I thought his video card was crapping out, but I now find that odd because he plays some 3D-rendered hunting game and while it's not Crysis it should crash his computer if CSS does.

His system has an AMD Athlon 2Ghz processor, 1G of RAM and a Nvidia 9600 GT (Special Clock Edition, he said). Those are the spec's I know. I also know he has a massive 22" widescreen monitor. According to the video card's box, it needs at least a 400-watt power supply and he has that.

Any ideas, guys?

 

In addition, I talked to him earlier and he said he tried running the game (CS:S, I believe) on the lowest possible settings and resolution. The game came up and crashed, but this time it said "No Signal."

Perhaps that helps?

 

The first thing I would do is clean out the dust and such from the case, fans, and heatsincs. When you boot it back up, make sure all the fans are spinning (especially the one on the GPU card assuming it has a fan).

If that does not work, you could try different drivers for the card, sometimes the newest is the best, sometimes an earlier version will work better for your setup. Try that and post back.

 

Alright, I'll do that. Thanks for responding, sir.

 

Sorry for the massive delay in new information, but I've been busy. However, I did buy what I called the industrial size of canned air from WalMart and sprayed down my brother's PC. Nothing. Also, all the fans are working. Next set of suggestions?

Thanks again, gentlemen (and ladies, if any are present).

 

question for ya - how long has it been since he installed drivers for his graphics card?

sometimes older drivers can get a lil... confused on a system - and a fresh set is needed to clean out the works, all he would have to do is find if there are new ones - download a copy, uninstall his old ones - reboot, and reinstall the new ones. if its that problem.

 

I have no idea, but I'll ask him. Once again, I'll give it a shot and get back to you all. Thanks, Phoenix.

 

clean the dust out of the fans sounds like its overheating .