I have a homebuilt PC that is about 2 old and worked fine until about a month ago. Now I am experiencing freezes at unpredictable times. The computer will become completely unresponsive, in some cases showing garbage on the screen, but sometimes just freezing the existing image in place.
If I power cycle the machine after the freeze, the fans will turn on but nothing at all is displayed. The fans will stay on and the display will stay blank as long as the machine is left on. If I power off the machine and then leave it off for a while, the machine will then start working again.
Here are the basic system specs -- I did not make any changes right before the problems:
CPU: Core i5-3570 (never overclocked)
Motherboard: ASRock B75M-DGS R2.0
Graphics card: PowerColor AMD Radeon HD 7870 (used to be overclocked, but problems continued after returning to stock speed)
RAM: 2x4GB Crucial Ballistix Sport
SSD: Sandisk Ultra II 480GB
Hard disk: Seagate 1.5TB 5900RPM 3.5"
DVD: Lite-On iHAS124-04
Case: NZXT 210
Power supply: EVGA 600B 600W
It doesn't seem like this would be an overheating issue (as I'd expect it to shut down completely if the temperature limit is exceeded), but I checked temperatures anyway. Here are the temperatures I see (no errors appeared during this testing):
CPU: 39C idle, 52C in games, 67C max in Prime95 after 20 minutes
GPU: 36C idle, 83C in games, 89C max in FurMark after 15 minutes
I can swap with parts from another PC to test, but as the freezes are unpredictable it would take a while to verify whether the problem is indeed fixed after exchanging. Could anyone suggest which component is likely to be the issue, or any quick way to figure it out?
Thanks,
Patrick
If I power cycle the machine after the freeze, the fans will turn on but nothing at all is displayed. The fans will stay on and the display will stay blank as long as the machine is left on. If I power off the machine and then leave it off for a while, the machine will then start working again.
Here are the basic system specs -- I did not make any changes right before the problems:
CPU: Core i5-3570 (never overclocked)
Motherboard: ASRock B75M-DGS R2.0
Graphics card: PowerColor AMD Radeon HD 7870 (used to be overclocked, but problems continued after returning to stock speed)
RAM: 2x4GB Crucial Ballistix Sport
SSD: Sandisk Ultra II 480GB
Hard disk: Seagate 1.5TB 5900RPM 3.5"
DVD: Lite-On iHAS124-04
Case: NZXT 210
Power supply: EVGA 600B 600W
It doesn't seem like this would be an overheating issue (as I'd expect it to shut down completely if the temperature limit is exceeded), but I checked temperatures anyway. Here are the temperatures I see (no errors appeared during this testing):
CPU: 39C idle, 52C in games, 67C max in Prime95 after 20 minutes
GPU: 36C idle, 83C in games, 89C max in FurMark after 15 minutes
I can swap with parts from another PC to test, but as the freezes are unpredictable it would take a while to verify whether the problem is indeed fixed after exchanging. Could anyone suggest which component is likely to be the issue, or any quick way to figure it out?
Thanks,
Patrick