rebooting during game play

First I would like to say Hello, im new to the forums hoping for a fun time .

Whenever I play a game counter strike or quake3 urban terror my computer gets a blue screen and reboots it self.

This happens after a few mins of gameplay.

My cpu temp is 39c idle and 43c load
case is at 21c

oh and my OS is WindowsXP pro without SP1. But has all the other updates.

my system [ totally blows btw ]

1.1ghz T-bird [ no o/c ]
BIOSTAR m7vkd
512sdram [ generic ]
TNT1 AGP [ total ownage ]
40gig Maxtor
40gig WD
Plexwriter cdrw
Pioneer dvd rom
sb live!
nic
330watt sparkle psu

I take it you dont have SP1 because of serial number issues......
What error message do you get when it blue screens? should be a long number followed by 4 others in brackets

could be a dipping rail

gaming stresses everything . could be a temp issue, power , vid card, memory. if i had to guess, probably the memory. the older amd mb's were really sensitve to noise. i remember using a stick of generic mem that worked fine in a bx 440 chipset board , putting it in a 751 chipset board and everytime i started unreal the game would fail very quickly. generic memory usually uses a 4 layer pcb that makes it noisier. i had to buy some higher quality micron memory, then it worked fine. vendors are trying to get rid of the sdram so you could probably get 512 of really good stuff for cheap... check microns website

I agree. Either the memory, or the video card is heating up
too much during games.

There is a link here somewhere to some memory testing
programs. Try those out.

i had problems with CPU heat on a large over clock, you may want to shut down all background programs

it was the ram. I just swapped the generic 512sdram for a stick of crucial 256 sdram and now all the games run fine.

Thanks for the help