Alright, with some help from the community last week, I picked the parts and built a brand new PC. Assembly was straight forward, OS install went smooth, and it seems to run well. Until you start playing games. Whether it's Football Manager 2011, Bad Company 2, or the Witcher Directors Cut, I can get about 5 minutes of game time before the PC hardlocks. I've tried reading some forums and see the typical answers (temperature, drivers, etc), which I've looked at. Here is what I have below
OS - Win7 64 bit
PSU - Corsair 600W
Mobo - Gigabyte Z68X UD4 B3
Proc - i5 2500k
RAM - 8 GB G.Skill RipJaws 12800
GPU - HIS IceQ Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Cooling - two extra three inch case fans, currently set to high to address any possible temp situations
HD - Maxtor 500GB 7500rpm (boot and game drive), WD 2 TB Caviar Green (nothing on it yet)
My first guess was temperature, as that seems to be the most common answer. Temperatures right now (all in Celsius and pulled from PC Wizard 2010)
Processor
Core 1 - 36
Core 2 - 39
Core 3 - 38
Core 4 - 40
GPU - 44. I've been able to see it as high as 50 before Bad Company 2 locked up
Those all seem to be in line with what's to be expected
So I moved on to drivers. I did an uninstall of both Radeon and Realtek Audio drivers using their Add/Remove tools, as well as DriverSweeper. Then did a fresh install of Catalyst 11.7 and Realtek R263. The problem still exists. GPUZ confirms the drivers are installed.
So now I am at a loss. My next step is perhaps a MemTest to confirm if the RAM is crap.
Any other suggestions for what to address? Is it a driver problem?
OS - Win7 64 bit
PSU - Corsair 600W
Mobo - Gigabyte Z68X UD4 B3
Proc - i5 2500k
RAM - 8 GB G.Skill RipJaws 12800
GPU - HIS IceQ Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Cooling - two extra three inch case fans, currently set to high to address any possible temp situations
HD - Maxtor 500GB 7500rpm (boot and game drive), WD 2 TB Caviar Green (nothing on it yet)
My first guess was temperature, as that seems to be the most common answer. Temperatures right now (all in Celsius and pulled from PC Wizard 2010)
Processor
Core 1 - 36
Core 2 - 39
Core 3 - 38
Core 4 - 40
GPU - 44. I've been able to see it as high as 50 before Bad Company 2 locked up
Those all seem to be in line with what's to be expected
So I moved on to drivers. I did an uninstall of both Radeon and Realtek Audio drivers using their Add/Remove tools, as well as DriverSweeper. Then did a fresh install of Catalyst 11.7 and Realtek R263. The problem still exists. GPUZ confirms the drivers are installed.
So now I am at a loss. My next step is perhaps a MemTest to confirm if the RAM is crap.
Any other suggestions for what to address? Is it a driver problem?