PC hangs/freezes for a few seconds

[jajeu30]

Hey all,

I'm dealing with an issue for several months already.

When I'm playing any game, my pc randomly hangs/freezes for 2-4 seconds. The symptons are that before it freezes, I'll get this black bar on my screen for 1 second. After the freeze I can just continue playing.

The first freeze after a fresh boot can take a while, but after that they're very frequent until i reboot again..

I've tried defragging my system, formatting, reseating my CPU cooler, ran memtest.

All my MB settings are on AUTO, except for my RAM (DDR2-1006) and the RAM voltage 2.1 (recommended on the OCZ site)

CPU temp stressed: 53C
MB temp stressed 49C

Specs;
Asus P5E (latest BIOS)
Intel E8400 equipped with Theraltake GOlden Orb II cooler.
OCZ Reaper DDR2-1066
Corsair TX750W
XFX GTX260 i216

Hopefulle someone can help me with this issue so that I can finally run this relative new system flawlessly!

Thanks in advance,
Jan

 

[hellwig]

Does it only freeze/hang when the game seems to be loading something?

What is your harddrive like? Is the drive itself new? Are you running multiple drives in a RAID? I know you defragged, but I wonder if there isn't a problem with the physical drive, or with a RAID or disk controller.

Maybe your graphics card is overheating (bad fan settings, loose heat sink), have you checked the temps on your card under load/

 

[jajeu30]

Hey hellwig,

The hangs are just during normal gameplay with every game, it's totally random and also occurs when nothing special is going on.
My harddrive is relative new, a Hitachi 500GB HDD. It's the only drive in my system.

I also noticed that instead of a black bar, textures just turn into a single color (black, teal). But whenever I alt-tab the textures are back to normal.

Checked my videocard under load, 65C.

 

[hellwig]

I have seen an issue on my own PC with certain audio (echoes) causing hangs and resets. This only happened in one game (Far Cry), and I assumed it was an incompatibility with Win XP Pro X64. I seriously doubt its a driver issue on your end, but if you don't mind reinstalling/updating to the latest video and audio drivers, thats probably the simplest thing to do.

However, if software doesn't eliminate the problem, it sounds like something is overheating, or overheated at some point in the past, and this is latent damage rearing its ugly head. Could be the CPU, could be the Motherboard northbridge, could be the video card. I would start with the video card, if you can borrow a loaner from someone I would swap it out first and see if the problem persists.