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Lights beside right-most RAM light up and my computer crashes

Tags:
  • Light
  • Computers
  • RAM
  • Motherboards
October 9, 2014 5:01:48 PM

Hi all,

First time posting, so I'll try to be as concise and descriptive as possible. I've had my computer for roughly 3 years and it's been a great machine through its life. However, recently playing any game at all on my computer causes my monitor to show "DVI No Display" and my computer crashes. At this point, I notice that 4 lights to the right of the right-most stick of RAM on my motherboard are lit up (the lights are beside the bottom half of the stick of RAM). After this occurs, my computer may or may not be able to boot up again. The computer gets to the Windows Starting Up screen before crashing in the same manner again. I've been able to get back onto my computer after unplugging my power supply for 5+ minutes. I assumed that something in my games may have been corrupted or that I may have picked up a virus (my tech knowledge is minimal at best). After doing a full system virus scan and re-installing the game in question, my computer continued to crash after a few seconds of play. The screen would freeze, go black, and I would get that delightful "DVI No Display" message again.

There are two possible things in my mind that may have caused this (not an exhaustive list). I recently installed the new game Shadows of Mordor. My computer usually takes a while to warm up. When I play other games like Counter Strike Global Offensive within 5 minutes of startup, my computer stutters a bit in the initial gameplay before chugging right along as usual. Well, after starting up my computer and playing Shadow of Mordor, that's when this first crash occurred. I may have had a higher graphics setting than I should have used and I'm concerned I may have fried something on my motherboard, GPU or RAM. I don't know what those 4 lights signify, so I can't speculate.

Another possibility lies in the virus idea. I decided to play on non-Valve servers in Counter Strike. Occasionally, such servers will download files before allowing you to play. 99+ files from such a download were flagged by my antivirus, Bitdefender. So perhaps some of my game files are corrupted. After I reinstalled, the issues still occurred so this option doesn't seem likely.

I'm at a loss as to what I can do right now and I'd be pretty disappointed if my computer (barely 3 years old) pooped out now. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!



SPECS

Power Supply - CORSAIR HX Series HX850 850W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI CrossFire 80 PLUS GOLD Certified

Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

CPU - Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield Quad-Core 3.06GHz LGA 1366 130W Processor BX80601950

GPU - 2x EVGA 012-P3-1472-AR GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) SuperClocked 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16

RAM - Corsair Vengeance Blue 16 GB DDR3 SDRAM Dual Channel Memory Kit CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9B



UPDATE: I lost my motherboard manual but was able to find one online. Apparently these lights are the DDR overvoltage LED's. I'm colorblind so I can't quite tell what color they are, but I'd hazard a guess that they are yellow meaning they are in a moderate state of overvoltage. I don't know how to act upon this though, can anyone point me in the right direction? Or perhaps is this overvoltage thing not the cause of my problems?

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