I built a custom machine with the following components.
Core Hardware
CPU: Intel Core i5-760 2.8GHz
Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3
Mem: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB)
GPU: GIGABYTE GV-N460OC-1GI GeForce GTX 460 1GB
PSU: SeaSonic 850W ATX12
Other Hardware
HD: Samsung 500 GB SATA II
Burner: LITE-ON Black 24X DVD+R
Case: LIAN LI Lancool PC-K62
Monitor: ASUS 21.5" Widescreen 1080P
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
And let me tell you its one beautiful machine. But the trouble started after installing Dragon Age: Origins (direct2drive). The game was running flawlessly at very high-res for an hour before it unexpectedly froze while in-game. At the point when it froze, whatever sound note was playing just repeats indefinitely on the speakers. Mouse and keyboard non-responsive and I'm forced to do a physical reboot of the machine.
At this point I have a flurry of freezing problems whenever trying to boot back into windows 7. First the monitor says no-dvi and does not recognize its plugged in. I reboot again and windows freezes at the welcome screen. I reboot again and it even freezes in safe mode (both networked and unnetworked). When I finally get back into windows after several more reboots then Dragon Age freezes again during the load screen. The freezing happens now both in dragon age and windows at random intervals and random triggers, from anywhere between a few seconds to a few hours.
I tried a plethora of solutions from reseating ram, disabling the dvd drive, flashing and resetting bios, running very low graphics settings, tweaking directx, disabling onboard soundcard. I monitored CPU temps, GPU temps, and fan speeds the entire time and nothing EVER exceeded 70-deg celcius. During some freezes the exposed part of the heatsink on the GPU was warm enough to touch my finger to it without burning. All windows updates were up to date and all drivers up to date also with no apparent trouble - none of it helped. I did notice that while playing DA:O my cpu usage would hang out at 60-80% at times which I thought was odd.
Aside from the "turbo" feature of the bios which does give the CPU a small boost - I'm not doing any overclocking and all settings are stock - but as I said the temps are always well within safe range. I checked ram/voltage timings in the Bios and they match the specs of the ram perfectly - only thing is the freq. is set to 1333 instead of 1600 but I don't see a way to change it and not sure if running it under like that could even hurt.
I reformatted and installed a fresh copy of windows. This time I only installed the minimum chipset drivers (latest ones from gigabyte) and latest video driver (from nvidia). I didn't install Dragon Age or any other software except some diagnostic tools. I ran stability tests and benchmarks against my GTX 460 in FurMark and it passed everything with flying colors. Temperature plateaus as 70-deg cel. even when I max it out for 5 minutes+! I thought my problem had been solved until it once again froze while I was selecting a screensaver from the dropdown and the entire computer locked up again.
Anyone got any idea what might be going on? Because of the occasional no-dvi message on the monitor, I'm inclined to think its an issue with the GPU, but it passed FurMark with flying colors. I'm out of ideas now and about to just start RMA'ing random components back to newegg.
I've attached a screenshot of the windows event viewer (Pulled right after the first post-reformat freeze up). The log contains events spanning the fresh install of win-7 up to the freeze which happened at approx 6:30-6:40. If anyone needs more than this I can try to host-up the real file somewhere and link out to it.
Event viewer screenshot
Furmark score @ 5-minutes
Core Hardware
CPU: Intel Core i5-760 2.8GHz
Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3
Mem: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB)
GPU: GIGABYTE GV-N460OC-1GI GeForce GTX 460 1GB
PSU: SeaSonic 850W ATX12
Other Hardware
HD: Samsung 500 GB SATA II
Burner: LITE-ON Black 24X DVD+R
Case: LIAN LI Lancool PC-K62
Monitor: ASUS 21.5" Widescreen 1080P
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
And let me tell you its one beautiful machine. But the trouble started after installing Dragon Age: Origins (direct2drive). The game was running flawlessly at very high-res for an hour before it unexpectedly froze while in-game. At the point when it froze, whatever sound note was playing just repeats indefinitely on the speakers. Mouse and keyboard non-responsive and I'm forced to do a physical reboot of the machine.
At this point I have a flurry of freezing problems whenever trying to boot back into windows 7. First the monitor says no-dvi and does not recognize its plugged in. I reboot again and windows freezes at the welcome screen. I reboot again and it even freezes in safe mode (both networked and unnetworked). When I finally get back into windows after several more reboots then Dragon Age freezes again during the load screen. The freezing happens now both in dragon age and windows at random intervals and random triggers, from anywhere between a few seconds to a few hours.
I tried a plethora of solutions from reseating ram, disabling the dvd drive, flashing and resetting bios, running very low graphics settings, tweaking directx, disabling onboard soundcard. I monitored CPU temps, GPU temps, and fan speeds the entire time and nothing EVER exceeded 70-deg celcius. During some freezes the exposed part of the heatsink on the GPU was warm enough to touch my finger to it without burning. All windows updates were up to date and all drivers up to date also with no apparent trouble - none of it helped. I did notice that while playing DA:O my cpu usage would hang out at 60-80% at times which I thought was odd.
Aside from the "turbo" feature of the bios which does give the CPU a small boost - I'm not doing any overclocking and all settings are stock - but as I said the temps are always well within safe range. I checked ram/voltage timings in the Bios and they match the specs of the ram perfectly - only thing is the freq. is set to 1333 instead of 1600 but I don't see a way to change it and not sure if running it under like that could even hurt.
I reformatted and installed a fresh copy of windows. This time I only installed the minimum chipset drivers (latest ones from gigabyte) and latest video driver (from nvidia). I didn't install Dragon Age or any other software except some diagnostic tools. I ran stability tests and benchmarks against my GTX 460 in FurMark and it passed everything with flying colors. Temperature plateaus as 70-deg cel. even when I max it out for 5 minutes+! I thought my problem had been solved until it once again froze while I was selecting a screensaver from the dropdown and the entire computer locked up again.
Anyone got any idea what might be going on? Because of the occasional no-dvi message on the monitor, I'm inclined to think its an issue with the GPU, but it passed FurMark with flying colors. I'm out of ideas now and about to just start RMA'ing random components back to newegg.
I've attached a screenshot of the windows event viewer (Pulled right after the first post-reformat freeze up). The log contains events spanning the fresh install of win-7 up to the freeze which happened at approx 6:30-6:40. If anyone needs more than this I can try to host-up the real file somewhere and link out to it.
Event viewer screenshot
Furmark score @ 5-minutes