iMac crashes (black screen) while playing Diablo 3
Hi,
I've bought my iMac 27" i5 quad 2.7GHz 8GB in January. It's been working fine, being used mostly for some gaming and desktop apps.
2 months ago I started playing Diablo 3, and started having problems after the first update. Basically, I can play for some time (ranging from 10 minutes to 1 hour) and after a while the computer screen just goes completely black, the last fragments of sound start to play in a loop (about .2 to .5 second) and the computer is completely unresponsive. The only course of action is to force it to shut down by pressing the power button for a few seconds. After that, it's not possible to restart the computer right away, I need to wait for a few minutes before it can start. It even happened once that it started to play the startup chime and stopped midway, shutting down all by itself.
A similar problem also happened once or twice, when the computer was simply sleeping and it became impossible to wake it up, I had to shut it down and start it up again.
I've explained the problem to Apple and even took my computer to the store for checkup. However, after they ran some tests they said everything was fine and didn't want to replace any component (it would have been the motherboard or the graphics card). All they could tell me was that I should reinstall the whole system (Lion, up-to-date).
I might do that. However, tonight I tried again to play while monitoring the various thermometers and fan speeds, played in windowed mode so I could see the curves, and set up the computer to take a screenshot every second (AFAIK the monitoring app I'm using doesn't keep logs) so I could replay everything. I got my usual crash after about half an hour. What the screenshots showed is that the various temperatures raised, which probably isn't a big surprise. However, they also show that about 3 minutes before the crash the CPU fan, which had been very stable so far, started to speed up very regularly. While it didn't reach any abnormal speed, it's still weird to see how it began so suddenly and so shortly before the crash.
As one can see from the values in the monitoring windows, the temperatures don't seem to me to be scandalous, but I may not be a good judge. Before I start reinstalling everything, I was wondering whether someone might have experienced a similar issue (couldn't find much about it on the web) or if perhaps these "symptoms" may be meaningful to someone?
I'm grateful for any advice!
Pagod
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4)