OpenGL Crashing my PC

Ok so I play a lot of games and have never had a problem with OpenGL before. Lately, I have been playing a lot of half-Life and have noticed a lot of crashing while playing it. Not just game crashing, but whole pc crashes. It just shuts off without warning like the pc overheated. Now I do have an issue with overheating but I downloaded speedfan which allowed me to cool down my pc before it gets to hot. Anyway, after a noticeable amount of crashing I thought it could be OpenGL which is causing the problem. I tested other games to see if that crashed my pc. I played Quake 2 in Software mode for about 3 hours fine. As soon as I turned it to OpenGL mode my pc died after 10 mins. Other games do this also. I thought it could be my GPU overheating but this does not seem to be the case as I downloaded a GPU monitor and yet my pc shuts off after 10 mins at about 60 celcius. My GPU is ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series. Please give any ideas you can think of. Thanks

Strictly speaking, “OpenGL” cannot crash a computer, but your graphics drivers can. Graphics drivers are an implementation of OpenGL created by NVidia, AMD/ATI, Intel etc. Depending on the quality of graphics drivers, they can cause problems, and result in the operating system to reboot. If the same games you mention play fine in DirectX mode, then it is most probably a graphics driver problem, if not, then it could be a hardware problem.

Your best bet is to upgrade your graphics drivers, which you can download here:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

If you already have the latest drivers installed, you can try reverting to older versions.

DirectX games e.g. Counter Strike Source do work without crashes. The problem with this however is that some of the latest ATI drivers create many artifacts in source games as discussed in a thread I created here: Steam Community :: Discussions What would be the best course of action here? Keep installing new drivers until both games work (openGl games and source games)? What do you recommend? Thanks