If you’ve been reading for a while you probably remember my travails getting my new computer up with an upgraded video card.  I also got a new monitor after my old one died — this one is a full 1920×1080 widescreen LCD.  When I got the new monitor I played around a bit with running some of my games at full 1920×1080 resolution, but I haven’t had a whole lot of time to play, so I didn’t do much.

Then I upgraded to Windows 7.  Although I loved and still love Windows 7, and didn’t notice any issues at the time, a new behavior has manifested that I was not seeing before — random system restarts while gaming.

The behavior is that as soon as a game starts really driving the video card, the fan starts to spin up and at some point the screen goes black and the system restarts.  It happens at different times in different games.  Thomas’s Wizard 101 runs fine indefinitely.  Half-Life 2 runs for 20 minutes or so without a problem.  Trine and Demigod blow chunks within 2 minutes of starting up when they’re cranked up to max performance settings.

So of course I tried all the standard techniques for diagnosing and fixing these types of problems:  the video card driver update (including a full old driver sweep), various other driver updates, extensive google search, tweaking video settings, etc.  Nothing seemed to help very much.

Finally I stumbled over a reference to power consumption, which rung a bell.  That video card is running pretty close to the edge on the power supply in my box, as my earlier article went into some detail about.  What if it was slipping a bit over the edge under Windows 7 running full-out?

To test that I went into the Catalyst Control Center and unlocked the overclocking tool.  As a test, I backed off the CPU and RAM timings by 50 MHz each.  I fired up Trine and… everything works great!  Demigod?  Same thing.  Except… I did have a crash after about 15 minutes in Demigod last night, so apparently this isn’t a perfect fix.  My current settings are 100 MHz underclock on the core, RAM clock normal.  That seems to do the trick; we’ll have to see if it cripples performance too badly.  I can fiddle with the RAM clock some more, but I’m guessing it’s the core that’s really sucking down the juice anyway.

So although it’s kind of a pain to have to actually handicap the performance of my awesome video card, I’m not complaining.  I didn’t have to cripple it by much, and I’ll gladly trade a few percent on my frame rate (which is excessive in almost everything I play anyway) to eliminate random reboots.