Hardware trouble! Looking for help!

[Jade]

Oddly enough, it heats up to about 51 C under load. It occurs during games of Counter-strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. But then I start up a game of Fallout 3 and it runs that perfectly with none of the same kind of glitches at all. SO weird. Maybe it just doesn't like the Source engine? I turned on V-sync with Counter-Strike and it seemed to fix these errors...Until the server switched to one particular map and they started up again. I have no idea what's going on. I'd say that my power supply is going, but given how weirdly inconsistent the problem is I'd say it's something else. I'm pretty sure Fallout 3 is a much more graphically intensive game, so the fact that I encounter these problems on only source games, as of right now, makes me want to think that it's a driver problem. What do you guys think?

[Stormcaller3801]

I would imagine it depends on how the Source engine balances the computational load between the graphics card's GPU and the computer's CPU, as opposed to non-Source engine games. If you've got the GPU doing a whole lot of work, it's going to heat up more. And if a particular map has not been optimized, contains a lot of detail, particle effects, dynamic lighting, or someone screwed up the optimization, it's going to be a larger strain than most. Valve's maps tend to be less processor-intensive just because they aren't made with the Source SRD. That allows them more flexibility than you can get with Hammer out of the box.