I7 build blue screened on Prime95

[Siggy19]

I have submitted this to another forum as well, but thought it would be interesting to Windows 7 users as well as people with home-built machines.

I built my own i7 on a P6Tse motherboard with 6GB RAM and a 4870/1GB using a Xigmatek Dark Knight cooler. I have installed the Windows 7 RC as the operating system (less than 20 minutes to install once I burned a working DVD and about 20 seconds to boot up).

Last night, I tried running a stress test using Prime95 and Speedfan to monitor the temps.

After it was running (on all 8 cpus - the joy of hyperthreading) for about an hour, the CPU temperature was still 54 C and the individual cpus were all running between 48 and 50 degrees. I left it running and, when I returned to it about three hours later I got a blue screen with some errors that went by too fast for me to read them. I suspect that this was an issue with Win7 (it seems a little flaky restarting from the screensaver). However, I would like to confirm this and report it to Microsoft. Does anyone know where any log files might have been created either from Windows, Prime95 and/or Speedfan ?

Also, while I know that a single hour is not a conclusive test of stability, is it likely to have been reporting accurate maximum loaded temperatures by then and is 54 degrees centrigrade a reasonable loaded temperature for my build ?

 

[Scotteq]

54 is plenty reasonable - Failing Prime, I would start with a (physical) memory issue since that is the most likely cause.

One thing you'll want to do is go into your preferences and uncheck the 'Automatically Restart' box when there's errors. Then the Blue screen will sit long enough for you to write down the actual error code.

 

[Siggy19]

54 is plenty reasonable - Failing Prime, I would start with a (physical) memory issue since that is the most likely cause.

One thing you'll want to do is go into your preferences and uncheck the 'Automatically Restart' box when there's errors. Then the Blue screen will sit long enough for you to write down the actual error code.

It got at least an hour in so I really suspect that the issue was with Windows 7 rather than that it actually failed Prime. Windows 7 seems to be a bit wobbly waking up after the screen saver starts... the mouse does not wake it, while the keyboard does.

I did not know that there was an 'Automatically Restart' option ! One of my pet peeves with Microsoft since MS-Dos 4.0 is that they have a habit of choosing the wrong default configuration. In the past they often did not have any information shown on how to change the configuration when this happened, but they are better now at including a nice little "Ignore this in future" checkbox. Thus, I think that they should make the default settings nice and verbose and provide the option to select the brief option when each message appears. It would also be nice if there were one place that had a list of all of the settings so that it would be easy to re-enable something that was switched off previously.

 

[Scotteq]

I disagree with your asessment W/R/T root cause. Please provide the hex code for the crash, so we can begin effective troubleshooting. While I can appreciate your frustration and that it feels good to vent, Microsoft rants won't solve anything and are therefore a waste of time.

 

[Siggy19]

I was not ranting or criticising Microsoft unreasonably. I did not know about the auto restart option and, in my opinion, it is silly for that to be set on as the default (especially on a beta version).

Would the crash dump have been stored on the hard disk somewhere ?

I am going to switch off all the power saver settings and try again tonight. Then, I will try switching them back on the way they are now. If the first test runs through and the second does not, we will know the area causing the problem.

If it fails on the first test, I will run a thorough memory test to see if anything is shown there.

Any other suggestions ?

 

[Scotteq]

My suggestion is to do what I asked - Get the Hex code from the blue screen.

Feel free to play with power savings, but if you have a memory issue, then playing with power savings isn't going to help you solve it. You're only introducing more variables into your troubleshooting.

 

[Siggy19]

I switched the power mode to 'Always On' and Prime95 ran all night without problems, thus I am now certain that the issue was that Win7rc x64 is a little flaky on the restart from power saving modes.