Computer restarts repeatedly

SCiVGA

I built this computer about a year ago,

AMD Athlon 3700+
512mb RAM x2 (popular name brand, forgetting which at the moment)
BIOSTAR GEFORCE 6100-M9 motherboard
VisionTek XTASY Raedon x800
KINGWIN Alpha Power AP-350 ATX12V 350W

Put everything together, worked fine... except when I started any heavy computing. WoW, Photoshop, Quake 4, etc would cause my computer to randomly restart. When the computer restarts it freezes at the Biostar logo at which point I hold down the shutdown button and turn it back on, where it will work fine until it gets into any game/hefty program.

At first I thought it was overheating because when I open up the case the graphics card and the heatsink on the cpu were warm. So I setup a small desk fan to point into the open case. I still crashed.. the same amount or even more frequently than before and everything in my pc was cool to the touch. So I'm thinking it's not overheating.

I was told it might be bad RAM so I tried putting them in every combination of different slots (4 slots) and even taking 1 of each stick out. Regardless of the combination, I still experienced crashes.

I just upgraded the computer to Vista and I still experience these problems on a fresh install of Vista with just WoW/Photoshop, by now it's pretty frustrating and I'm wondering if you guys had any insight on what it could be. I'm 99.9% positive that it's hardware related. Could it be that it's only a 350 watt powersupply? because thats the only thing left I could think of but don't necessarily want to blow money on a new one unless that's the problem.

Thanks in advance

localh77

Last year I had a problem with my computer restarting over and over, and it turned out to be the power supply. Every time I asked someone what they thought it was, they'd give the logical answers, just like what you tried (overheating, ram, virus, etc.), but in the end it was just the power supply. (Which is good, it's an cheap fix).

JWFokker

It could be any number of things unfortunately. It could be your PSU, your RAM, your motherboard or your CPU. Download Everest to monitor your CPU/GPU/northbridge (chipset) temps. You may just have a poorly seated heatsink. If you don't see anything out of the ordinary there, try running Memtest86, which you can download for free. If that it's not overheating or bad RAM, it's likely either your motherboard or CPU, which you can only really determine by swapping one or the other out. Of the two, it's more likely to be a bad motherboard.