Troubleshooting freezes on a homebuilt PC

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Skon

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Mar 11, 2013
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I built my friend his first gaming pc less than a year ago with these specs

FX6300 black edition w/ Arctic cooling alpine 64 pro cooler
Asus M5a97 r2.0
2 4GB Corsair cmz4gx3m1a 1600Mhz cl9
2GB 7870
OCZ zs550w PSU
SanDisk SDSSDHP-256G-G25 SSD
Western Digital 1TB HDD

He said that it started freezing after playing SW Old Republic and the PC would freeze upon restart on the windows welcome screen. As well as not being able to go into safe mode where the screen would go black after the PC loads the list of basic drivers and files.

We've done everything I can think of to try and troubleshoot the problem but had the same problem.We've tried

-Unplugging everything
-using only 1 stick of ram and swapping
-Clearing the CMOS
-Using a different graphics card

We then decided to reinstall windows on the SSD and then the HDD to see if it was a software problem or a virus. We managed to get further, loading to the desktop before freezing again on really random things like when installing mobo and graphics card drivers or closing a window.

I'm not really sure what's going on. Could it be the Motherboard playing up or the CPU? Any help will be greatly appreciated.
 
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David_M

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May 17, 2014
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hi, I'm the guy he built the pc for. We have not tried a different psu as i don't have a spare, like wise with the motherboard or processor. Is there a way to check the psu apart from swapping it out for a different one?
 
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SethJPC

SethJPC

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Sep 14, 2013
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19,565


Yup there are several ways to check it, firstly just check if the PSU makes any unusual sounds.
If not then disconnect everything, unplug the power, push about 3 times on the front panel power button (eliminate any remaining current), reconnect everything and then try booting it up.

If none of that works you could have a missing driver if it list them have you tried start up repair?

 
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David_M

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May 17, 2014
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Hi, I'm at work at the moment so cant give it a check right now, but i don't remember any unusual; sounds coming from the psu, but then i wasn't listening especially for any from the psu.

I have tried unplugging and pressing the on button to remove any excess power and rebooting but that didn't seem to have any effect.

I did manage to run one start up repair in between freezes before we formatted the hard drives and did a fresh install of windows. In that start up repair i think it did find one problem in the root section. Though i was hoping that the formatting and reinstalling of windows would have solved something like that. However i don't know anything about the root section so that could just be false hope.

also i have hopefully attached a photo i took last night of the main screen in bios which has temps and voltage information on, in case it helps.
cake7.jpg
 
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David_M

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May 17, 2014
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Upon turning the pc on tomight i could not hear any unusual noises coming from the psu.

I ran windows start up repair but that didnt find amything wrong.

I can seem to run amything of length after it loads the desktop as it freezes after a few minutes each time.

One thing i have noticed is that on the bios screen the two fans that are attached to the case keep drasticly changing speed, from 1016rpm to 675000 rpm, continuously switching between the two.

(edit) tried to boot it up with out those fans attached, but it froze just after log in.
 
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David_M

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May 17, 2014
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Anyone got any ideas, i can not run any kind of software tests as it freezes within 5 minutes no matter what i do, except if i just leave it on bios, only.then ot wont freeze.
 
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David_M

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May 17, 2014
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Ok, so I sent the motherboard back to amazon for a refund and got a gigabyte 970a-ud3p but the change of mother board didn’t seem to make a difference. First it ran fine for a while and then it started freezing/hanging when trying to use the internet and that progressed until it was freezing and hanging just after start up before the start up fanfare sound had even finished. So now I can assume it’s not the motherboard.

I have two hard drives connected one a solid state and one a regular one. Before I did try a fresh install on each hard drive separately but that didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

However I did manage to get into the system log on to see the what errors were occurring and it was the same three, first it was event id 3011 and 3012 (always together) and the third event id I can’t recall at the moment, but it lead me to believe that something was corrupting the registry.

I have also been running memtest 86 and with both of my ram sticks in it found errors in test 7. I have been able to test one of the sticks last night and on its own it passed without errors overnight and I will try to test the other ram stick when I get back from work tonight.

Could bad ram be corrupting the registry files on the hard drive?
Could both hard drives have failed? (I did run checks on them, one from their manufacturers and one called hdtool? (possibly) but they didn’t turn up any errors)
Or am I missing something else?

One other thing, in the bios information I did find that the ram had different tRFC values, but I have no idea if that matters, all I could work out is that it is something to do with timings, one ram stick had a tRFC of 140 and the other 44.
 
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