Problems with 3D games

[esc]

My pc is screwing up and i can't seem to find out why. It suddenly halts when playing games for an unspecified amount of time, not too short though. I have a strong feeling that this only happens when full 3d games are being played, however this does not occur in a few games like the RTCW ET Map Test and NOLF 2. They do occur in games like UT 2003, Freelancer, Praetorians, and others. Everything looks just perfect before an unexpected crash happens. Windows also can't recover from this error (Opening the Task Manager, etc.)

Here are my pc's specs:
Athlon XP 2000+ T-bred
512MB PC 2100 DDR SDRAM (Generic in a sense)
Inno3d GeForce4 Ti4200 VIVO 8X AGP
ECS L7S7A2 Motherboard
Win2k w/ SP-3
DirectX 9
Detonator 43.45 drivers
(All other software/drivers are left as-is from its newly installed state.)

I can't find anything on this kind of system error on the web, so if anyone has experienced it or can help me with it, please do so. Thanks in advance.

 

[DannyBoy]

My ECS K7S5A does exactly the same thing when it gets too hot.

Make sure heat is not an issue.

What cooling have you got?

 

[esc]

The whole system is about 50 degrees Celsius. I will try and put a Volcano 9 (The best there is here) and see what happens. The funny thing is that weird problems are starting to pop out of nowhere in win2k. When I scan for hardware changes in the device manager, the system reboots or hangs. It even reboots when some installers are run (this happened with w2ksp3.exe, directx 8.1). It even rebooted once when I tried to exit the fulscreen mode of the basic media player that came with win2k. This is so hard to figure out. Even a clean install couldn't change it. Must be the hardware.

 

[DannyBoy]

Yeah, everytime my pc crashes the cpu temp is ALWAYS 51 degrees cel.

I dont know why, amd processors are supposed to be able to hit 90