System crashing, no idea why

KMBaron

Distinguished
Feb 22, 2006
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Just built a new system in late jan, and having issues. First off these are the parts.

e8400 intel cpu
ASUS Striker II Formula LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
PC Power & Cooling S75QB EPS12V 750W Power Supply
2x BFG Tech BFGE88512GTOCE GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0
ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 120mm 2-ball UFO Bearing / Transparent CPU Cooler
2x Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
Windows Vista

All went well for a few days and then i started getting crashes and lock ups. Sometimes while watching video files the video would get all staticy and lock up the system. sometime i would get purple screens of death. I've heard about those. and many lock ups in games. Plus sometime apon reboot. after the windows loading the screen would go black and never get to the logon screen.

So i reinstalled vista and all went well for about 2 weeks. then much of the same stuff again. the coimputer will crash sometimes 8 times a day or lock up.

At first i thought it might be the video cards, or one of them. Cause i would sometimes get a game crash and vista would say the video card stopped repsponding and then recovered. so i swithched video cards and turned off SLI to test each one. problem again went away for a few days and then returned.

I ran memtest on the memory for several hours and not one error. I should point out that the memory never worked at 1066mhz no matter what i did. it ran at 800mhz. Aside from the issues, this pc is fast when it works. i'm not sure if it's a video card issue or motherboard or memory. if it is the video cards it must then be both the cards which are not working right.
 

pokemon

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Oct 8, 2004
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18,780
Definitely looks like a graphics driver problem. Try out some different versions of the graphics drivers. It is possible that you have a bad memory/mobo combination, since sometimes you can get an error free memtest when testing the RAM. I would try the graphics drivers fix first though