Your CPU is probably overheating.

Either find a way to keep it cool during gaming(extra fans, anything).

Or buy a new pc.

i think its OSPs fault, use cpma

i think youre a troll, please leave

No wait, it's probably OSP.

do any other games give you this issue? also, what brand of psu, and if you know it, what's the wattage and voltage on the +12v rails?

it sounds to me like overheating, as previously stated. if you're knowledgeable, you might be able to check the temperatures of your major components, like the cpu or the video card. also, if you're overclocking, does this issue happen if you disable overclocking?

Sounds like an overheating problem indeed. Try to find out whats overheating.

Most common is either your cpu or vga.

You people didn't learn yet do inform Q3 Newbies about Quake 3 PRO Installer ?

http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1514034

A random polish exe will fix his overheating problems? Interesting.

can I use that .exe to safely remove all my cooling fans?

cpu overheat, overclock?

I put q3 again on an old machine and had a similar problem. Looked into generally how to check stability and ran Stress Prime 2004, it failed after a few seconds and was not caused by heat. Ran memtest86+ and that went fine. So it looked like it was something to do with the cpu so I just underclocked it a bit and upped vcore voltage, after a few failed attempts and crashes I got prime to run for 12 hours without problems (think 24 hrs is recommended to check stability but I needed to play q3!!)

This might ofcourse not be exactly the same as your problem, just hinting at what you can try out. Just google the programs and don't blame me if you fuck it up in some amazing way. :o

Download temp monitoring utils.

Find out healthy temp for your CPU/GPU and test what yours does.
You can underclock the GPU with "coolbits" so long as you don't use too new an nvidia driver. Or cut the blue wire to use maximum fan speed.

As for the CPU, make the fan work full speed and see if that helps, should be able to do this in bios, or hack it by cutting the "BLUE WIRE". Or look into riva tuner, which for some reason I never liked.

But yeah it sounds heat related. Oh possibly check max core shutdown temp and increased it, but I would address your coolling.
Also worth nothing useing lower graphic settings will help.

r_mode 4 or 5 would be good.

A newer pc would be even better:)

vaccuum the dust out of your pc

only an idiot can think that is the cause :(

HA HA HA !!!112