World-of-warcraft – How to stop some games blowing fuse

teraworld of warcraft

I've been gaming for a while now. When playing certain games this PC goes into overdrive. The fan/fans start/s to sound like a jet engine it/they get/s so busy. Also I have smelt burning when this has happened. The fuse blew on the 4 socket adapter I was using recently.

On the following thread someone said this could be due to the PSU not being strong enough to handle the load, in what it seems could be a related issue someone had, although the person who posted this question did say that blowing a fan on their PC stopped it crashing in that case: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2047543/gtx-650-overheating-issue.html.

This is exactly what they said:

Your GPU isn't overheating. 70+ before it would shutdown and cause a restart. Make sure your PSU is strong enough to handle your new system at load and possibly run Memtest to check your RAM (although not BSOD'ing and just shutting down points to the PSU).

This (the PSU part) makes more sense to me than it being to do with dust etc, since it seems a more plausible explanation of why the fuse blew.

The PC has no problems except when playing certain games: i.e. TERA Rising and WoW with add-ons (I think WoW is ok as long as I don't have more than 1 add-on (Healers Have To Die)). I'm just wondering if anyone knows or can suggest what I might be able to do to be able to play these games without this problem occurring.

The PC's spec is this:

Display: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650

8GB RAM (6 available)

Processor: AMD FX ™ – 8120 Eight-Core Processor – 3.1 GHz, 4 Cores, 8 Logical Processors

I have also asked this question on superuser.com. Here is a link to it:

https://superuser.com/questions/767113/gaming-blew-fuse-and-causes-funny-smell-how-to-overcome/768159?noredirect=1#comment996554_768159.

I clicked delete to remove the question here on gaming.stackexchange.com, but a message appeared which said that the deletion of questions which have answers is discouraged and leads to a question ban if it happens repeatedly, so I won't be deleting the question, as I don't want to do something that is discouraged or move closer to a question ban.

There has been quite some progress on the superuser post, although I don't feel ready to accept any of the answers at this stage.

Best Answer

I used to have issues only when playing WoW. All of the addons plus 25-man raiding really put a strain on the CPU, but it didn't used to. I saw that my CPU was really pushing its limit and multiple times I'd get a BSOD in the middle of raiding.

I used an application to check the temperature of the CPU and it was very high. Cleaning the dust out of my PC and re-seating the CPU with thermal paste got it running like new, again.

If your PC used to be able to handle WoW and has only been recently having issues, there's probably just a lot of dust buildup. I know it's easy to get caught up in the digital aspects of your PC, but don't forget about the physical aspects, like I did. It's an investment of maybe an hour to fully clean all of the dust out of your PC and re-seat your CPU.