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
Excellent to see you back In The Game, so glad that little episode is sorted for you now
Good job!
Troubleshooting that sort of thing can… frustrating. I usually get hung up assuming it’s a software problem; good job on thinking of adding fans.
Glad to see it worked out!
I have ET installed, but I never play. What server are you usually on? Not that I know when I’ll have time, but it’s worth a shot.
Check out http://clan.lugradio.org for all our server and game details.