Games freeze - I'm at a loss 1mo of troubleshooting

[blacklist]

To give you an idea of what was done before this started reoccurring. Had solid lock up, which required reboot.

Hardware:
Windows 7 x64
i7 920
EVGA GTX 285 SSC - SLI
EVGA x58 (RMA'd)
6 GB DDR3 1600 (G.Skill)
2 x 1TB HDD (caviar black WD)
1 x 640GB HDD (caviar black)
1 x OCZ Agility 60GB SSD
Corsair HX1000W Modular PSW (previously a TX850 Corsair)



Problem: Edit: CAN NOT CTRL ALT DEL out of the freeze
Freezing - a hard freeze, requiring a power off. This would only happen while playing games, and it would happen when it wanted to. Battlefield Bad Company 2 could freeze immediately, or I could play for 6 hours. This has happened with Borderlands, Batman AA, Dragon Age etc. I originally went about making sure I wasn't pulling too much power for the 850 TX.

I did all of the following, with nothing changing the hard freeze. It always happened, but only in games. I could prime95 for hours with no problems.

-Removed one GPU
-Removed primary GPU and used 2nd GPU as primary
-Upon reboot I noticed my 640GB was not in the computer
-Moved games from 640GB to the SSD
-Deleted all steam / games and reinstalled it and Battlefield BC2 on the SSD
-removed the 640GB from the loop (no power or data connection)
-removed drivers, tried 5 different versions, even going back up to a year. (used driver sweeper / safe mode method)
-swapped sata ports for the SSD
-used a different sata power on a different line than the rest of the HDD's
-Ran Linx 40 passes, started with 20.
-Ran Prime95 small FFT, large FFT for an hour each
-Ran in game benchmark for Just Cause 2 about 5 times
-Ran Memtest+ overnight (10+ hours)
-Ran Vantage 10 times with varying settings in EVGA Precision, from base clock to FTW speeds.

None of this caused a crash, not even a momentary pause. As a result, I ended up RMA'ing the mobo. I bought the Corsair HX1000W because I wanted to OC / watercool down the road. NOW it gets fun.

Reassembled computer, installed windows on SSD again + drivers and everything else it needs.

I played games without freeze for over a week.

I shut the computer off last night (letting AS5 cure) and today when I turned it on and loaded up Borderlands, it froze within minutes. I've been sitting here for 2 hours testing the memory and even easter egging (pulling 1 dimm out at a time).

This is a completely different motherboard and power supply.

The memory timings are what they are supposed to be, and the voltage is set to manufacturer recommendations.


Here's my question now, could the SSD be causing the problems? When I was on Windows 7 RC1, I had the install located on an actual HDD (caviar black 640GB). When I got windows 7 retail, I bought the SSD as well. It was shortly after having everything up and running, that I noticed the freezing. It seems weird that I would only now notice that, but I never thought the SSD would be causing these problems. It's also in IDE mode, not AHCI. I've noticed that when rebooting into windows, it hangs at the light blue screen just before desk top. It used to flash by, so I'm not sure whats going on.

The SSD is still blazing fast once I'm in windows, and everything is fine until I load a game.

 

[Maziar]

You seem to have tested almost everything that anyone could have recommended
Well,a friend of mine had a similar problem,he got many lockups in games and in windows he had slowdowns and when he changed the HDD,problem was solved.
Just to make sure that your SSD is working OK,remove your SSD and test the games with your HDD,and check how it performs

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

Have you tried down clocking the gpus to stock speed? my BFG GTX285 came with unusually high overclocks and behaved like your system. I eventually clocked the bios down to reference speed and it has been great since.

 

[blacklist]

Tried down clocking to Vanilla speeds, still froze.

I reinstalled windows 7 on the SSD, installed drivers, installed steam/borderlands (the one that was most quick to freeze).

I am able to play with no problems so far. I have my original BIOS settings for 4.0GHZ, I knew that wasn't the cause, because defaults did it as well.

I suspect, I'll see the game start to freeze in about a week. It must have something to do with the way this OCZ is handling data. There are a lot of variables that could have caused problems last time, so I am leaving this SSD pretty much untouched. I only turned off the 3 things OCZ recommends disabling - the rest is handled by 7.

We'll see how it goes.

 

[Maziar]

As i said in my earlier post,test with your HDD(take out the SSD)and see how it performs

 

[blacklist]

As i said in my earlier post,test with your HDD(take out the SSD)and see how it performs

Yeah, thanks for the advice
I would have installed it on my 640, but it's acting up. By acting up, I mean it vibrates the entire case. It's really spinning, and it just started doing this, and disappearing from BIOS/Windows at random.

So I decided to reinstall on SSD and see if it corrupts again. There are several things I did differently this time, so it might be interesting.

Thanks again everyone.

 

[Maziar]

hmm,is it possible for you to test with another SSD or HDD?