Bear with me, I'm not a computer wiz by any means. Exactly why I'm asking here.
First the specs:
Gigabyte P55a-UD3
Intel i5 760 @ 2.8ghz
Stock cooler. I have an EVO 212 lying around but didn't feel the need to overclock so I never installed it.
12gb of some Kingston DDR3 (2x4 and 2x2, all same model)
Nvidia Geforce 460 gtx 1gb
TI firewire pci-e card with a Presonus Firebox plugged into it.
Antec Sonata III 500 (original PSU intact)
So, I've had this setup for casual gaming and more serious composing for around two years now. It's worked flawlessly, no crashing or other weirdness. However, I recently started getting some random crashes. It's not BSOD'ing, it just freezes without any warning. Windows logs have been of no help as apparently it doesnt have time to log anything prior to crashing. So I started investigating into it, reinstalled windows, made sure all hardware drivers are up-to-date and working properly and the freezes continued. So I updated bios. Still freezing. That made me suspect a hardware fault, so I ran prime95 overnight, memtests and seagate tools. No faults whatsoever, temps stay below 70c during p95, and below 40c while idle. I've yet to crash a single time when actually under heavy load like during gaming, the freezes happen when I'm just surfing on the net or just listening to music with everything else on idle.
So here are some questions I'd like an answer to:
CPU-Z is showing me clock speeds of 3.3ghz while Easytune 6 is showing me clock speeds of 2.4ghz even during prime95. As the cpu is on factory settings, shouldn't it be at ~2.8ghz? Bios indeed is showing me 2.8ghz on boot and P95 is reporting 2.9ghz. I'd understand slight variances but I'm pretty sure those readings are just waaay out there. Any clue?
My cpu core voltage is set to 1.3V, yet it's mostly hovering around 0.8-0.9V, occasionally jumping to 1.1V or so. Is this normal droop and isn't 1.3V a really high core voltage anyway? Again, on boot bios gives me readings of 1.2V.
Another thing to note, a few days before the freezes started happening, my Steelseries diablo 3 mouse started disconnecting itself randomly, as if the mouse was plugged out and back in again. Event logs were of no help there either, so I reinstalled the drivers and update firmware, yet the disconnects continued. So I gave the mouse over to my friend to test it, but he hasn't gotten around to it yet so I'm not sure if it's related at all or not. I just found out that a lot of people have been having the same kind of issues with SS mice, so I assumed it's just a faulty mouse.
So based on all of above, what piece of the hardware should I suspect, if any? The cpu readings makes me suspect that I'm in need of a new one, but I don't want to start replacing parts until I know a bit more. Can it just be the PSU?
First the specs:
Gigabyte P55a-UD3
Intel i5 760 @ 2.8ghz
Stock cooler. I have an EVO 212 lying around but didn't feel the need to overclock so I never installed it.
12gb of some Kingston DDR3 (2x4 and 2x2, all same model)
Nvidia Geforce 460 gtx 1gb
TI firewire pci-e card with a Presonus Firebox plugged into it.
Antec Sonata III 500 (original PSU intact)
So, I've had this setup for casual gaming and more serious composing for around two years now. It's worked flawlessly, no crashing or other weirdness. However, I recently started getting some random crashes. It's not BSOD'ing, it just freezes without any warning. Windows logs have been of no help as apparently it doesnt have time to log anything prior to crashing. So I started investigating into it, reinstalled windows, made sure all hardware drivers are up-to-date and working properly and the freezes continued. So I updated bios. Still freezing. That made me suspect a hardware fault, so I ran prime95 overnight, memtests and seagate tools. No faults whatsoever, temps stay below 70c during p95, and below 40c while idle. I've yet to crash a single time when actually under heavy load like during gaming, the freezes happen when I'm just surfing on the net or just listening to music with everything else on idle.
So here are some questions I'd like an answer to:
CPU-Z is showing me clock speeds of 3.3ghz while Easytune 6 is showing me clock speeds of 2.4ghz even during prime95. As the cpu is on factory settings, shouldn't it be at ~2.8ghz? Bios indeed is showing me 2.8ghz on boot and P95 is reporting 2.9ghz. I'd understand slight variances but I'm pretty sure those readings are just waaay out there. Any clue?
My cpu core voltage is set to 1.3V, yet it's mostly hovering around 0.8-0.9V, occasionally jumping to 1.1V or so. Is this normal droop and isn't 1.3V a really high core voltage anyway? Again, on boot bios gives me readings of 1.2V.
Another thing to note, a few days before the freezes started happening, my Steelseries diablo 3 mouse started disconnecting itself randomly, as if the mouse was plugged out and back in again. Event logs were of no help there either, so I reinstalled the drivers and update firmware, yet the disconnects continued. So I gave the mouse over to my friend to test it, but he hasn't gotten around to it yet so I'm not sure if it's related at all or not. I just found out that a lot of people have been having the same kind of issues with SS mice, so I assumed it's just a faulty mouse.
So based on all of above, what piece of the hardware should I suspect, if any? The cpu readings makes me suspect that I'm in need of a new one, but I don't want to start replacing parts until I know a bit more. Can it just be the PSU?
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram