Gaming crashes

Friend of mine has a weird issue with his system and I thought I'd run it by the group and see if anyone has some insight.

I built the system for him about a year and a half ago, budget gaming build, the only even remotely stressful thing it's used for is playing Guild Wars 2. Video has been handled by a Sapphire HD4870 card, and until recently he has been thrilled with its performance, never had any video issues even in the most crowded areas.

He had a hard drive failure and decided to replace it with an SSD. I reinstalled his OS (32-bit Windows 7 Ultimate) on the SSD and installed the drivers that came with the motherboard. He took it home and updated his other drivers and reinstalled all of his software.

Since that point, the machine works fine until he gets to a place in that game where there is a lot of activity, lots of different players etc, then the game crashes. Since it worked flawlessly before the crash, I suggested he roll back his drivers and see if he had better luck. No help. He bought a new MSI HD7850 card and installed with the latest drivers. No help.

This has my baffled as the only changes we made were to replace the mechanical drive with the SSD and reinstall the same operating system.

Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Try reinstalling windows again. Just go completely fresh and try again.

Might be good to check hard drive controller mode to make sure it's set to AHCI. The hard drive likely wouldn't care but I've had an SSD that really did.

If your switching to AHCI there are two ways, a reg edit before doing it or reinstalling after setting AHCI otherwise you won't be able to boot.

We are going to try a fresh install of the 64-bit version of the OS, I will check the AHCI setting. This may sound silly but I assume that's a setting in the BIOS?

BIOS setting is correct. Can vary in where it's found from chipset options to boot devices to RAID settings from what I've seen.

did the cpu heatsink budge at all?

Glad to say a new install of the 64-bit OS seems to have cleared up the issue. I don't see how a 32-bit vs 64-bit OS could make this kind of difference but that was the only thing changed.

Regardless, working well now, thanks for the replies!