I was playing UT 2004 for around 40 minutes or so and had WinAmp running in the background belting out the AC DC tunes.

I shut down UT to get back to the desktop, and the screen went all weird.
I could not read the icons, and everything was cloned a zillion times, but not readable.

Had no choice but to hit the Win key, then the U button, then hit enter.
That shuts the PC down.

Booted back up and I got a loud squeal out of my 5.1 speakers, and the monitor was blank, and went into power saving mode.

Had no choice but to push the power button off.
Let the PC sit for a few minutes, then fired it back up.

It booted up just right, but when I opened back up WinAmp, the tunes were only coming out of one speaker.
At first I thought I blew a channel in the amp, but not so.
Checked the sound properties in Creatives Audigy 2 ZSs control panel, and it was set on 2.1, not 5.1.

Somehow the vid card must have got hot, and WinAmp might have messed with the speaker properties, not sure.
But all is well now, it works perfect.

I have seen some strange stuff happen to PCs before, but not like this.
CPU is running at a cool 28 Celsius, and the mobo is at 30.
I bet it just got a little warm in there or something.

Anyone have some weird quirks happen like this before, then all is well later?

 

our video card got pretty warm a while back...then the capacitors blew up and our computer didn't work. I guess that doesn't really help make the future look better, sorry.

 

that's really strange corey... never quite seen all of that at once.. but i have seen them re-occur seperately. as for your temps...thats ice cold.. a comp isnt considered 'warm' until around 50C.

My roommates old desktop (before his $200 in cooling upgrades) used to run at 54C on the mobo, and 74C on the CPU, not overclocked, with a P4. Mind you, it was about 45C in the room, thats still REALLY hot. And he had no glitches at all.

 

I do have some very good cooling, that might help keep the temps down.
I have two 80 mm fans front and rear, and a huge mama that blows over the entire mobo.
http://pnw4runners.com/tando/pc20.jpg
http://pnw4runners.com/tando/pc21.jpg

Also dual fans for the hard drive.
http://pnw4runners.com/tando/pc8.jpg

Now the rig is overclocked.
It is a P4 2.4 c chip which are famous for responding well being pushed high.
I have been running it for over a year now at 30% over via the Asus P4P800 BIOS at 3.12 GHz.
I do not have a current pic of it at 3.12, but here is one at 2.88 GHz, or 20% overclocked.
http://pnw4runners.com/tando/pc23.jpg

You can see it runs pretty cool.

It may have been a combo of it running at 30% over too which did this, or perhaps WinAmp had something to do with it too.
I will have lots of time to test it out again to see if it duplicates itself again.
I have a 4 day weekend to do nothing but relax and play

 

Welcome to the Wacky World of Asus P4P800.

Power supply. That wacky supply will make your PC do things that virus programmers only dream about.

I have had an Asus P4P800-Deluxe for 2 years. Just last spring I power supply cap leak. It was like my PC was cursed by Ford and sent down the pagan path to Chevrolets headquarters where Chrysler waited with a magic sludge hammer.

Consider this a warning and replace your power supply.

 

PS on the mobo, or the generic 300 watt PS that came with the case?
I know it is under powered, and I plan on getting an Antec 500 watt or so down the road.

I want to put in my last AGP card, an ATI X800 later, and it needs more power to run it than what the current 300 watt one can supply.

Next PC I build will be an AMD 4800 dual core, PCI Express, the new Creative X-Fi soundcard, yada yada yada...

Another GB of RAM to go with my current 512, the new PS, and the vid card will be the last upgrades on this 2 year old box.

After I build the new AMD, this one will go in the spare room so my son will not have to lug his over all the time when we game here.

 

I ran into something similar to that when I built mine a while back. I was running the fx5900 ultra 256mb card with a 350w antex power supply. Well between all of my fans, lights and everything else, my video card was trying to drain too much power when I would do some gaming and the pc would just shut off on me.

I ended up having to quickly fix it by installing a 2nd power supply internally that I had laying around to use strictly for the alternate power on the video card. This was a pita in my already crowded case...

 

Computer case power supply probably is faulty. Antec and Deer are on my list for good power supplies.

2 gig of ram will work well but ... 4 gig will ensure your PC is usable 2 years from now (If you keep the P4P800).