Overheating is a good guess, and just buying a "ridiculously large fan" won't necessarily be enough. It's all about air FLOW. You have to get fresh cool air coming in and hot exhaust air going out in a constant stream. If you have a giant rats nest of cables blocking that flow of air, it won't matter how big the fan is.
There's also no details about the PSU, which might simply not be up to the task of powering that video card when it starts working pretty hard to handle the graphics of a game. Most PSU's have cutout circuits in them that are designed to prevent anything dangerous from happening when you try and pull too much power from them.
To start, just pull the side cover off and see if that alone helps. If it helps even a little, you have a thermal problem. If it doesn't seem to help at all, you probably have an overtaxed PSU. Depending on how long he's been letting these shutdowns happen, there's an increasing chance of there being damage to other components with every shut down if it's the PSU. So there's a possibility of some collateral damage by this point. The same goes for if it's a thermal issue. That hot air building up inside the case with nowhere to go could have slow baked a few components to where they will have had their life expectancy shortened significantly.
While you have the thing opened up, also make sure you go in and blow out any dust bunnies from fan blades. It may not seem like much, but even a very thin layer of dust will reduce the amount of airflow that fan produced. Both by making the fan spin slower from the added weight of the dust, and the dust making the gap between blades that much narrower and allowing that much less air to pass though. It's as good a time as any to get at them all with a can of compressed air.
I received a new/old tower from my younger brother. I don't play games on my computer but if I were to play WoW or something, I'm curious if his system would hold up or crash on me as it did for him. He knows nothing about computers and just threw stuff in here and I'm wondering if some of this "stuff" is actually good, bad or ugly.
Here are the system specs:
OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
Other OS Description Not Available
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name COMPSTAR
System Type X86-based PC
Processor AMD Phenom(tm) 9500 Quad-Core Processor, 2200 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG, 12/19/2007
SMBIOS Version 2.5
Windows Directory C:\WindowsSystem
Directory C:\Windows\system32Boot
Device \Device\HarddiskVolume2
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "6.1.7601.17514"
User Name COMPSTAR\INKD.REVY
Time Zone Eastern Standard Time
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 3.00GB
Total Physical Memory 3.00GB
Available Physical Memory 1.96GB
Total Virtual Memory 6.00GB
Available Virtual Memory 4.95GB
Page File Space 3.00 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys
Also, he has this dual copper fan (it's pretty big) and a eVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT Graphics card installed. He often complained that the computer would routinely "shut off" when he would play games. Like it would overheat or something. Which is the primary reason he bought that ridiculously large fan.
Is there anything I could do to fix the problem or reseat the fan maybe? I used Arctic Silver 5 Hugh Density Polysynthetic Thermal Compound.
Any information would be great!
Thanks in advance. ![]()

Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic