Civ V shuts down my computer

FYI - I fixed it! Used a dust cleaner on my fan's vent-out and it's been running 10 degrees cooler than before.

Thanks for the recommendations from other threads.

CivilizedHokie said:

I've just purchased Civ V and am having the same random shut down events. Both times the following has happened:

1. Load game
2. Play for ~15-20 min
3. Laptop spontaneously and immediately shuts down completely

My specs:
Dell XPS M1530
Core2 Duo @ 2.5 GHz
4 GB RAM
32-bit Windows Vista SP1
DirectX 9.0 version of Civ being run

My computer gets pretty hot pretty quickly, but I can't remember this ever happening before. On a side note, I don't have SP2 because I couldn't connect to the internet after installing that, so I had to system-restore back to SP1. I hope I don't have to choose between internet connectivity & Civ V.

Any thoughts on what may be the problem? I assume that Civ V is updated to the most recent patch through Steam, but have no way of confirming that.

Click to expand...

Apparently Civ5 will cause the graphics card to overheat. There is a thread about this on the 2k forum in the support section. http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.php?88710-Generic-GPU-CPU-Over-heating
I just replaced my graphics card due to an overheating problem with my old card. After playing Civ5 for some time my graphics card would give me a low power error message and I would have to shut off the computer or have the monitor go into sleep mode. This would happen after only 15-30 minutes of use and just doing some web browsing.
After setting the new graphics card fan at 85 it would run at a temperature of 30-35 for normal use. I then played civ5 for about 15 minutes or so and closed the game. The temperature of the graphics card had risen to 48. This was an increase of over 40% in just that short time.

I had the same problem, Civ 5 would shut down in the middle of a game without warning. Here's the fix that worked for me. I uninstalled and reinstalled both Steam and Civ 5. I think the software gets corrupted because the files are so big.

As far as I can tell this is not a system error, at least not for me. My system runs more processor intensive games than Civ just fine, such as Planetside 2 (which runs only on the CPU: stupid, I know), Europa Universalis 4 and Crusader Kings 2. In Windows 8.1 I got an DXDIAG error message on top of a black screen. I couldn't fix it back then after numerous attempts at a solution. Upgraded to Windows 10 and reinstalled Civ thinking it might work now. I get the same black screen, but with no viewable DX11 error and no way of getting out of the black screen. Ctrl + Alt + Del doesn't work. Windows Key + Tab doesn't work, Alt + Tab doesn't work. Requires a hard restart. My graphics card is an Nvidia 860M. Ironically enough, my old laptop with Windows 7 actually runs Civ, yet now that I have a pretty solid computer I can't play.