Various Steam games causing crashing problems?

[GrievingJosh]

Okay well, I don't actually know what's going on, but certain games on Steam are causing these weird crashing issues (L4D2 appears to be the worst). There's no indication it's about to crash, such as a loss in performance or anything, just randomly happens. It's happened in 3 games so far, MW2, Portal 2, and L4D2, but again in L4D2 it happens consistently, like literally every single time I play. The crash creates this interesting pattern on the screen, then the Computer dies and restarts, I'll attach a picture of what it looks like. Seriously I'm out of ideas, I ran a ton of stability tests to make sure it wasn't the PC itself and it appeared okay, temps are just fine, and it only happens in certain game, like I played Simcity for a couple hours, then after played a bit of CS:GO, then tried to play L4D2 again and it died. It's really quite annoying, but any help would be appreciated.

 

EDIT: I also did the Verify Integrity of Game Cache thing in Steam and it came back with no issues, and when I say this only happens in certain games I mean it, every other game runs perfectly with no issues and the PC doesn't even hiccup under daily use.

Specs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ at stock speeds, I backed the OC's off of everything to make sure it wasn't a gone bad OC.

4GB Corsair DDR2
Gainward GTX 280
ASUS M2N4-SLI
Maxtor 200GB for OS, WD Green 1TB for Storage

Corsair GS700 (Extremely overkill I know, but it was going for a really good deal at the time)
I know it's an ancient rig, but it's pretty solid and still plays most games great. 
 

[-ism]

That pattern is similar to the one I saw when my dad's Radeon 9200 died.

[AlwaysFSX]

GPU or CPU is dying? Run Furmark or Kombustor on the gpu for a few hours and then Prime95 for a few hours.

[GrievingJosh]

That pattern is similar to the one I saw when my dad's Radeon 9200 died.

I was wondering if it was a GPU issue, but then again this happens in a few very select games, gives me no problems any other time.

[GrievingJosh]

GPU or CPU is dying? Run Furmark or Kombustor on the gpu for a few hours and then Prime95 for a few hours.

Done that, ran it overnight, didn't return any errors or anything.

[AlwaysFSX]

I was wondering if it was a GPU issue, but then again this happens in a few very select games, gives me no problems any other time.

Might be a power supply issue then? But this really does look like a hardware failure happening.

[-ism]

Also try clocking down the ram on your GPU. I got similar funny colors when I OC'd my GPU's ram too high. 

[GrievingJosh]

Might be a power supply issue then? But this really does look like a hardware failure happening.

I tried it with another 550W PSU I have laying around, with a HD 3870 GPU in place of the 280, and the same thing happened.

[GrievingJosh]

Also try clocking down the ram on your GPU. I got similar funny colors when I OC'd my GPU's ram too high. 

I'll give that a shot, it's running at stock speeds at the moment, I tuned the OC out after this all started.

[GrievingJosh]

Also try clocking down the ram on your GPU. I got similar funny colors when I OC'd my GPU's ram too high. 

Tuned the GPU RAM down by about 100MHz, also bumped up the voltage ever so slightly just in case it wasn't getting enough, game crashed after about 30 seconds.

[-ism]

Tuned the GPU RAM down by about 100MHz, also bumped up the voltage ever so slightly just in case it wasn't getting enough, game crashed after about 30 seconds.

 

What CPU do you have, does it have onboard? Or do you have another video card you can try? 

 

Edit: Lol I never read your hardware in the first post. Yeah try with another video card.

[GrievingJosh]

What CPU do you have, does it have onboard? Or do you have another video card you can try? 

 

Edit: Lol I never read your hardware in the first post. Yeah try with another video card.

Tried with another GPU and it returned the same thing, same game, same amount of time (about 30 seconds before crashing) I'm thinking, something in between Steam and the game, has gone corrupt? Not sure, oh and the CPU is at stock speeds.

[-ism]

Tried with another GPU and it returned the same thing, same game, same amount of time (about 30 seconds before crashing) I'm thinking, something in between Steam and the game, has gone corrupt? Not sure, oh and the CPU is at stock speeds.

 

If it was a problem with Steam I think it would just crash the game not your entire system. It seems that it isn't your video card so that's good. Not sure what else to try, I don't think you have another CPU just laying around you can test. Try taking out ram and mixing and matching I guess?

[GrievingJosh]

If it was a problem with Steam I think it would just crash the game not your entire system. It seems that it isn't your video card so that's good. Not sure what else to try, I don't think you have another CPU just laying around you can test. Try taking out ram and mixing and matching I guess?

[GrievingJosh]

 

If it was a problem with Steam I think it would just crash the game not your entire system. It seems that it isn't your video card so that's good. Not sure what else to try, I don't think you have another CPU just laying around you can test. Try taking out ram and mixing and matching I guess?

 

Sorry about that, attempted to use mobile version, and funnily enough I have a Athlon X2 4200+ laying around, along with a set of OCZ platinum RAM, tried that and no luck thus far, caused same problem.

[-ism]

Sorry about that, attempted to use mobile version, and funnily enough I have a Athlon X2 4200+ laying around, along with a set of OCZ platinum RAM, tried that and no luck thus far, caused same problem.

 

Weird. Make a copy of your Steamapps folder and then reinstall steam and put it back in and then see if it does the same thing. This happens only in Steam games, correct?

[GrievingJosh]

Weird. Make a copy of your Steamapps folder and then reinstall steam and put it back in and then see if it does the same thing. This happens only in Steam games, correct?

Yeah only in Steam, and in select games, 99% of my Steam games work perfectly fine, like I said I played CS:GO on Steam for hours, then tried to play L4D2 and it crashed. I'll give reinstalling Steam a go.