Hello,
Asus p5gdc mobo
Pentium 4 3.4
Ati GRAPHICS (sorry, helping a friend - not sure)

About choosing a forum... I thought this might concern both windows and DOS

The system has xp installed, just formatted. The pc has been crashing (screen just freezes - no error message OR rebooting) after about 5 minutes of playing a game. This has just happened but it wont reboot this time. It freezes at the boot screen (picture of mobo etc). The first time i had an error message saying "3RD master not detected" but it hasnt hapened since. Tried getting into BIOS but its freezing before i can.

To GIVE this some history,
Supposedly this has been happening for a while but no damage has ever been done to the hardware from it.
The crashing when running a game would lead me to believe that that its over-heating...maybe? i checked the the graphics fan is working which it is. Then checked the CPU temp which was around 70 just after crash. I should have checked the Graphics card temp but i ... didnt really know how so i left it for the time being... but i guess this is another problem considering im not even able to boot into windows, thought it might shed some light on the problem for someone who knows a lot more about this than me.

Thanks in advance for any help!Ok, i have changed from a wireless keyboard to PSP and its letting me press delete in order to enter BIOS: im not sure how to set up the third IDE Master though. The 1st and second are set to cd DRIVES though.Make sure all FANS and heatsinks are operating normally.

Test HDD and RAM using diagnostic software.