Random freezes

[msfeinstein]

I've just finished building a system. I re-used the hard drives from my old PC, but all other parts are new:

 

[msfeinstein]

Sorry - accidentally hit 'post'

Hard drives (reused from old system) are WD Raptor 74GB (system disk) and Maxtor 6B300S0 (data disk).
New equipment includes:
- Asus P5E3 Premium M/B
- 4GB OCZ DDR3 memory
- PC Power and Cooling Siilencer 750 power supply
- eVga eGe-Force 9600 GT KO video card
- Intel E8400 CPU

I installed Vista Ultimate (including SP1) with little problem.

When the machine is running, it will simply freeze up. No response from k/b or mouse and the disk stops spinning. It doesn't matter what I'm doing (reading email, playing a game, etc). Nothing short of a power down will get it going again (I haven't let it sit for very long - maybe 10 minutes - to see if it will start up again).
Sometimes, it'll take 2 hours to freeze. Sometimes, five minutes. Once it freezes, shutting it off and back on sometimes works but, more often than not, it freezes almost instantly.
The machine doesn't appear to be running hot (93F motherboard temp and 122F CPU temp) and all voltages appear to be normal (I'm not overclocking or anything).

I've run some basic diagnostic tests. Memtest86+ on the memory (all four modules got some errors - not sure what that means) and Hitachi Drive Fitness Test on the drives - no errors there.

Any ideas, thoughts, etc on what to do or check? Thanks.

 

[monst0r]

Did you reformat both drives completely (not quick format)? Make sure windows is detecting your CPU, et cetera in device manager. Make sure you have your RAM timings and voltages correctly set in the BIOS.. That's all I can think of right now :\

 

[monst0r]

Just thought of something else:
When I installed vista 64 for the first time, I tried to do it with all 4GBs of my RAM installed. It caused a lot of problems (BSOD RAM related) until I patched up the system. Did you install vista with all 4GB in the PC?

P.S. You shouldn't be getting any error messages at all, it should be rock solid. Try upping the voltage a little bit, maybe loosen the timings.

 

[croc]

I'd check the event viewer for any system events, might be some help. Also those temps don't seem low to me, unless the system was really loaded at the time.

I'd also check the temps on the GPU as well. Try running the clock widget on the sidebar. Does it stop as well?

I'd be leaning towards gpu lockup, or gpu drive failure. Due to the immediate freeze upon a restart, probably the former. And probably due to overheat.

Try removing the case side panel, and pointing a small house fan inside, see if that helps.