Computer Freezing/Crashing?

[so1dier]

I just bought my computer yesterday and it's worked perfectly up until today. All I have done is updated drivers and downloaded 2 games. Yesterday I tried out Team Fortress 2 and played it for about 2 minutes and it worked perfectly. All I have done today is installed World of Warcraft and after it was done I tried playing that. For 20 minutes it worked perfectly and then it froze. At first I thought it was my video card overheating because this is the first thing I have done besides the short TF2 session that has been graphics intensive. I restarted my computer, logged in, and it froze again. Then after about 15 seconds it started working again and a little alert popped up in the bottom right saying AMD drivers have failed but have been recovered. I didn't really pay attention to that but because it froze so quickly I thought it was just still hot and overheating.

I waited an hour and turned the air conditioning on in my house cause it was about 84 degrees and I thought it might help. I started up windows a few more times and it kept freezing, and giving me that same AMD driver error. So now I called my friend and he said to try doing some memory tests or full system scans but I have no clue where to start. I did try updating my drivers for my RADEON XFX 5870 card from the newest one 10.6 in June to the 10.5 version from May and so far it hasn't crashed, but I am about to start up World of Warcraft in a little bit and see what happens.

Does anyone know what the issue might be?

 

[so1dier]

Alright so I got the 10.5 driver and my computer gave me a weird screen while playing wow. Just striped vertical bars on my monitor but I could still hear the audio of the game.I restarted the computer and in the start up screen there was a box saying that there might be issues with overclocking. It showed a box with my cpu and ram speed. It gave me a solid black screen after that so I restarted. I went into my bios and before I could change the ram setting it gave me a solid blue screen, I restarted and it happened again. I restarted and went into bios and change the ram speed from 1600 back to 1333 and saved and quit before anything bad happened that time. When it tried booting up again I got a weird screen with crazy white pixels and lines flying up the screen. On the next restart nothing happened. I realized I hadn't updated windows yet so I installed all windows 7 updates. After those were installed I restarted and I still got weird visual effects on the start up screens like white pixels and white lines flying from the bottom to the top of the screen. The computer kinda froze a couple time on the log in screen, then resumed after about 15 seconds. I'm not sure what it could be but changing the ram back to the default 1333MHz speed, changing the driver update to my video card from the 10.6 to the 10.5 update, and getting windows updates didn't help, I'm still getting issues.

Does anyone know what's going on?

 

[Guest]

I don't play WOW, however, I had similar problems when playing TwoWorlds and Oblivion. The crashing got worse and worse, and along with this crashing was this awfulll "durdurdurudurdurudur" noise which could only be stopped by pressing the power button.

In the end I realised that it was to do with Ram. Sound crazy, because the more Ram you have then better I would have thought? Lol.

Well I had 6GB of DDR3 Ram, and after removing one stick, leaving just the 4GB the crashing problem went away. It was really bad and I couldn't find an answer anywhere on the internet.

I don't if this will help you in this situation but, it's worth a try...

 

[so1dier]

I ran the memtest86+ and I got 0 errors for memory.

 

[MadGoat1979]

A list of your components will be helpful (im assuming you built the system yourself?)

also be sure your card is getting the correct power. 5870 has 2x6pin connectors (iirc) Be sure those are connected and correctly seated.

Also be sure your CPU heat-sink is seated proper. if you can make it into the bios and get to the PC Health tab (or equivalent) and see what the CPU temp is at.

Try that out and give us your system specs and we can start the troubleshooting.

 

[so1dier]

System Manufacturer/Model Number
N/A

OS
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

CPU
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz

Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-790XTA-UD4

Memory
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 1280

Graphics Card(s)
XFX HD-587X-ZNFV Radeon HD 5870 (Cypress XT)

Sound Card
N/A

Monitor(s) Displays
Acer P235Hbmid Black 23" 5ms HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor

Screen Resolution
1920x1080

Hard Drives
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"

PSU
Antec TruePower New TP-750 Blue 750W

Case
Antec Nine Hundred Two

Cooling
4 case fans

Keyboard
Razer Arctosa

Mouse
Razer Imperator

Internet Speed
Cable 10Gbs

Other Info
N/A



Ya, I just opened my case and made sure all my pieces were plugged in, I even unplugged my GPU from the pci-e2.0 slot and plugged it back in. And switched my 2 ram sticks from the 2 blue slots closest to the CPU to the 2 white slots farthest away from the CPU. I also am using the second DVI slot on the end of the graphics card instead of the first one in case the first one was bad.

In the bios under PC Heath tab it said my cpu temperature was about 35 degrees celcius. On the desktop it also says my gpu temp is 31 degrees celcius.

 

[so1dier]

 

[so1dier]

Alright well I just played world of warcraft for about 30 minutes, I got one weird screen flash in the game but it hasn't frozen yet. I just alt tabbed out to post on these forums and say everything was working pretty good but I opened the browser and right before I clicked bookmarks the computer flashed weird pixel colors(like blotches of squares throughout the screen), then froze for about 3 seconds, then the screen turned pure white for about 3 seconds. The system sounded like it was about to power down but then it kicked back in and powered up and it started to working again. This is the usual cycle it goes through when it freezes in windows. But when it freezes in games the screen gets all messed up and I haven't waited more then 2 minutes for it to start working again so I would just restart.


While gaming my CPU never went over 40 degrees c and my GPU never went over 50 degrees C.

 

[so1dier]

My computer is failing to synchronize the time online also... and it won't load pandora.com anymore??!?!??!

I think I'm about to try reformatting.

 

[MadGoat1979]

This is a the South Bridge Driver for your chipset. Download and install this driver. Knowing this driver is up to date will help further testing.

(this is a direct download from AMD, no worries about spyware/malware)

Thinking further about it... I once had a very similar issue with a 7xx chip-set once that ended up being a AHCI related issue. Random errors and black screens, hangs and what have you. It turned out that windows 7 was using a generic Microsoft Driver for the AHCI sata. THIS is also a link to AMD for the AHCI driver for your chip-set. Give that an install after installing the South Bridge driver.

After installing both driver (with reboots in between both) Pull up windows update and click "Check for updates". There might be some "Optional updates" that could include some driver for your system that will now be recognized due to the South Bridge driver.

Let us know how that goes, and we'll go from there.

*edit* Apparently AMD doesn't like linking to their downloads.

Sooo, Go HERE.... click on "Motherboard/Integrated Video Drivers", Then click on windows 7 64-bit under "Individual Drivers (Motherboard/Chipset)". From there You will see the South Bridge driver and AHCI driver. Then you can make sense of the rest of the post (Sorry for the lengthy confusion)

 

[so1dier]

Someone on another forum pointed out this was the issue.

I am about to return my PSU unless you have anything to say about it if he is right or wrong. If it's just the PSU then I'm not going to mess around with the drivers right now.

 

[so1dier]

Btw my computer is freezing in the bios so I'm not sure if installing drivers would help.