Over the past six months I have had an extremely irritating problem with my desktop computer – whenever I went to play games in 3D it would last a couple of minutes, and then crash out. Sometimes the game would just die, but I also had some hard crashes. Now, for the uninitiated, Linux (which my desktop runs upon) doesn’t do hard crashes – there is no blue screen of death – and so 99% of the time this indicates a hardware failure of some sort. There sometimes is the potential for a driver issue, but there were no reports of similar problems anywhere online.
The first candidate for failure was the graphics card – after all, it was 3d graphics causing the problem. An overheating graphics card could well be the problem. Finally, 2 weeks ago, a new gfx card arrived fresh from ebay. But it didn’t fix the problem – I almost cried.
Next candidate was dodgy memory – I had noticed that a kernel compile was falling over in different places each time. But an overnight run of memtest86+ showed that nothing was wrong.
And so we reached the CPU fan. One new Akasa fan later (plus a couple of system fans for good measure) and on Friday night I was back in action. 2 mammoth Enemy Territory sessions over the weekend proved that all was well.
Happiness 
mrBen
