P8Z68-Gen3: New Build Constantly Locks Up

[Emmuh]

I recently built a new computer and ever since have been having an issue whereby it locks up and just hangs. The screen remains frozen and neither the mouse nor the keyboard will work. It stays in this frozen state until it's rebooted.

My specs are as follows (running Windows 7):
Asus P8Z68-V Gen3
8GB kit of Corsair Vengeance CML8GX3M2A1600C9 (automatically set in the BIOS to run at 1333MHz)
Asus GTX 560Ti DirectCU II TOP 1GB
Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD
i5 2500k
Corsair TX-650 V2 PSU

I'm in the process of double-checking that all my drivers are up-to-date. As far as I'm aware, I can't update the BIOS because there has only been the 0301 release.

Any tips from anyone?

 

[tlmck]

Go into BIOS and set the memory to 1600 speed and leave the voltage at 1.5.

 

[Emmuh]

Have set the memory frequency to DDR3 1600 and the voltage is defaulting to 1.506V. Could that be causing the system issues though? I had assumed it would just decrease the performance of the RAM, as opposed to causing system instability?

 

[tlmck]

Ram can be finicky sometimes. Some will run at slower speeds, some will not. I have Kingston HyperX in a similar board and it was flaky at 1.5v and 1600. However, when I set it to the proper 1.65v for that ram, all was well.

 

[Emmuh]

Well I haven't had another crash in the last 30 mins or so, so touch wood it'll be okay. Either way, I greatly appreciate the help.

 

[tlmck]

Good to hear. It seems the faster these things get, the pickier they are.

 

[Emmuh]

Sigh, I spoke to soon... the problem persists.

Last time it froze was in the BIOS, so I assume that would rule out any OS problems. The only other thing I noticed (and this may or may not be normal, my last build was a Pentium 64 ) was that it shows the Asus 'press del to enter BIOS' screen twice on startup with a quick three or four line flash which mentions 'PCI Express' in between. It's too rapid to discern anything else.

Any other ideas? I might try to reinstall some of the drivers from the Asus CD (Intel chipset drivers, etc.) and see if it makes a difference.

 

[tlmck]

Drivers wold not kick in necessarily at the BIOS post screen, but I think the screen you are referring to says something about PCI Gen 2 "no device found". I get the same thing. I have not researched it, but I think it is telling you that one device slot is empty or something. My board is dual card, and I just run the one. It always boots fine, so I ignore it. I do not even think it is an error message as much as a notification.

At any rate, I would go ahead and download and run memtest86 if it will. You never know, you may have gotten a bad one. http://www.memtest86.com/

 

[Emmuh]

Turns out that I cannot get it sufficiently stable to run memtest without it locking up. I have tried running the individual sticks of RAM in the A2 DIMM, but I suppose the slot could be faulty so I'll try A1 maybe.

I unplugged my PCI wireless adapter, having read that a temperamental PCI slot could upset things, and now I'm going to try unplugging the GPU and running off Sandy Bridge graphics.

I disabled SpeedStep and C1E as I read that they could cause issues, no luck with that.

My HDD is formatted as AHCI, don't know if that could cause a problem and maybe I ought to reformat it just to give it a shot.

I did however get a 0x00000124 crash dump last night while trying to memtest, indicating a hardware fault; that's the first BSOD I've had.

Could I change the default target CPU turbo from 3.7GHz to 3.3GHz to see if that has any effect? I think I'll just have to hang out until next week and I can start swapping parts with a mate's desktop to isolate the problem.