Comp randomly shutting down

So I was playing WOW and was in the middle of a raid, and boom, my computer shut down.  No warning or anything.  It happened before while playing Half-Life 2.  Any Ideas?

Could be heat related...  Have you rebooted ASAP into bios and read your temp on the CPU?

Other possiblity is that it could also be power related.

its a bluescreen, XP doesnt show them and reboots instead. you can change that in your system settings under startup or something. do that, wait for crash, remember bluescreen, ask again.

If you bugchecked, your event viewer should have some logs as to the cause of the BSOD.  I agree with >>2 in that heat is a prime suspect.  Another possibility, given the high-load situations of your crashes, is your PSU can't kick out enough juice.

Heat's more likely, though.

could also be a memory problem, since those do almost always produce bluescreens with stop messages ( or reboots in your case ). just because a comp crashes it doesnt automatically have to be heat related, i still dont get why people always suggest this first. the psu being too weak is also a very rare case. id say its your ram, especially because the source engine and wow are both very memory-intensive, and faulty ram or ram timing problems occour VERY often.
just run memtest86 ( use google if you dont have it yet ) for a few hours, if nothing happens, you can worry about heat or whatever.
also, get motherboard monitor and check your temps WHILE playing. entering your bios after the crash and reading the temps isnt really helpful because CPUs and GPUs cool down very fast when not under load. my 7800gt takes about 5 seconds to cool down from 70 to 40 °C.

>>5

I've had heat and seen heat cause problems like that half a dozen times on machines I've personally worked with.  I've seen a bad RAM stick cause a problem like that once.  And that was more than half a decade ago.  In my own experience, heat is a much more likely culprit, thus I naturally mention that as a possibility.

As for a weak PSU, I've seen *that* more often than a bad ram stick too.  Especially in more modern machines.

If you want to be pedantic about it, the problem could be anything from a wonky driver to a bit flipped in the BIOS.  "Any ideas" are simply that, possible problems rooted in peoples' personal experiences with a problem.  You're welcome to suggest bad ram as a possibility, but there's no need to get uppity about other peoples' suggestions.

Could be overheating. The cpu usually manages to cool down fast enough during the selfreboot to boot up again without showing you any signs. I'd check how much dust got between the fan and the grill thing. Last time I had those problems, I had a little dustcarpet keeping most of the cold air from getting trough :(

3 main causes:
1) weak psu on the +12v line
2) bad ram
3) overheat


tell us whats your +12v line on your psu and temps with what hsf and what cpu. run memtest68? i don't remeber that name but it's memtest to see if you have any errors on your mem