Computer's been freezing since inception, tried everything please help

[smallfrie81]

I did my first build about 9 months back and have tried a ton of different fixes for a problem i have been having since day one, my computer freezes after a little while when I play videos fullscreen and when I play games. Sometimes it will work fine for hours or even days without a problem, but other times it will freeze everytime i open a video and full screen it, be it on hulu or with vlc. At first I thought it was he operating system, I tried xp, ubuntu, and now i am using windows 7, it has happened on all of them. I thought it was the drivers for my graphics cards so I made sure they were all updated, I thought there might be a cooling problem so i got a huge cpu fan and my case has 5 fans, I got a new hard drive. I think the problem is either with the graphics cards themselves or with the RAM, iv run memtest84 and its come up with nothing, im running it again and im gonna run orthos. I want to be sure that it is a problem that can only be fixed by replacing the graphics cards before i drop $200 or more on a new one. Windows says that there is a video hardware error. When it freezes the screen doesn't go black, everything just stops. Also happens during file conversions occasionally.

CPU Specs

Intel Core 2 Duo Q9400 Quad Core Processor
4 GB OCZ Platinum RAM DDR3
4 GB OZC Intel Edition RAM DDR3
2 GeForce 9500 GT 1 GB DDR2 graphics cards in SLI (Iv taken one at a time out and tried and same problem occurs no matter what I do)
OCZ 850w GameXStream Power Supply (SLI-Ready)
EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Socket 775 Motherboard
Cooler Master HAF 932 Full Tower Black Case
WD Caviar Green 1TB 8MB/SATA-3G

 

[jack_attack]

Try running a Memtest and setting your RAM to MFG specs.

http://memtest86.com/

Sounds like you're running into some bad RAM, it's relatively easy to sort it out.

 

[capt_taco]

This sounds exactly like your RAM is not getting enough voltage. Can you post the specific model of your memory?

In any case, most boards will supply 1.5V to DDR3 by default, but all of the OCZ Platinum looks like it falls between 1.65V and 1.8V. If your RAM is not getting enough voltage, you will get random freezing in just about any program. It's easy to fix -- just go into the BIOS and set the voltage to the correct setting manually.

In an undervoltage situation, Memtest will sometimes show errors and sometimes won't, since there's actually nothing physically wrong with the memory. Definitely try looking at the voltage first.

 

[smallfrie81]

well it stopped the freezing randomly but i think it fried one of my sticks cause now there are a bunch of errors and I cant even turn on my computer with my dual channel OCZ Platinum in, I am sending it back. Could this have been caused by my increasing the voltages?

 

[capt_taco]

What did you increase the voltage to? If you just set it to the recommended spec, or even 0.1V or 0.2V over, you can't hurt it. RAM is designed to handle that. (Also, which setting did you change? I hope you were in a menu called "DRAM timing/voltage" and not "core voltage" which would be the CPU voltage, and that's something you CAN fry components with).

Also, can you get it to boot with just one RAM stick in? If so, try rotating the sticks of RAM and see if you can identify a bad one. Or, if all the sticks check out individually, try rotating them among the different memory slots. There's always an outside chance something's wrong with your motherboard, like a bad RAM slot. Though I'd put that lower down the list in terms of likelihood.

 

[smallfrie81]

I did that and the ram slots are fine, i set it to the recommended voltage, not .01 over.