I bought a new system a couple months ago and had the store put it together.
Phenom II 965
Radeon 6870
Antec 620 high current gamer power supply
Asus M5A88-V Evo board
8GB RAM 1600Mhz Ripjaws
Everything new, nothing over-clocked.
The are two problems, right from the day I brought it home, always when I play any games.
First, the computer will often lock up. It's an intermittent problem, completely random. Sometimes I'll play for 10 minutes and it freezes, other times I'll play for hours before a lockup, or sometimes it just works and doesn't freeeze at all. When it locks up, there is no sound and no response to the keyboard. I need to hold down the power button to turn it off and on again. Once I get it
rebooted, I can continue gaming as if nothing happened. There is nothing in the Windows Event Viewer to indicate what the problem is.
The other problem playing games, far less frequent but just as random, is that the computer will turn itself off. I can turn it back on without issues.
It's too random to be overheating, plus I've kept an eye on CPU, mobo and video card temps, nothing out of the ordinary there.
Some of the things I've tried were downclockig the memory to 1333 so that the memory controller would not be overclocked. I've also adjusted the RAM timings to match what is recomended for AMD CPUs. I've updated the BIOS a couple times, and everything else should have up-to-date drivers. I've also tried giving the CPU a slight voltage bump (from 1.4 to 1.42), no help there.
I've run various tests (Memtest, prime95, furmark, all three at the same time) but nothing seems to trigger a problem like a game does, but since it's random, who knows for sure. I didn't let these run for more than a couple hours, I suppose I could let them run longer...
At first I suspected faulty power supply. I decided to see what would happen if I downclocked the CPU and video card. CPU normally runs at 3.4 Ghz, I capped it at 2.7. The video card normally runs at 900, I capped it at 825. When running with these settings, I never encountered an issue. I had it set like this for over a week, so even though it's random, I'm confident it's stable with these settings.
Next I tried downclocking just the video card, but putting the CPU back to default speed. These settings were not stable, I still got lock ups.
When I switched it (CPU downclocked to 2.7 again and video card back to normal), the system was stable.
My conclusion from this was that I had a faulty CPU. I thought I could narrow it down to a particular core, so I started assigning game threads to particular cores with the CPU back to full speed.
The game I'm playing now is Star Wars: The Old Republic. It has two main threads, I can lock each one to a particular core. For example, one on core 0, the other on core 1, leaving the other cores idle. Unfortunately, I tried every core extensively, they all seem OK. The PC never seems to lock up like this. (If I don't set the affinity to particular cores, the threads just seem to bounce from core to core at random and the PC will eventually lock up.)
So.. any thoughts? Bad CPU? Maybe the L3 cache or something else outside the cores is not quite right? Any help is appreciated.
Thanks
April 4th update: It still hasn't been resolved but I'll keep this post updated in case it helps someone else. I can rule out the power supply, as I tried a different one in the system for a few days and I still had three freezes and one shutdown in that time. Before that I also tried adjusting the RAM voltage to 1.55 (auto is 1.5) with the RAM downclocked at the same time, that didn't seem to help. I am virtually certain it's the CPU or mobo, hopefully I'll find out which one soon. (AMD CPU and ASUS mobo combination seems rather popular for showing up in threads like this one.)
May 8th final update: The shop replaced the board and the cpu. They said the cpu had excess thermal paste and something about bent pins (?). So I guess I'll never know if the mobo or cpu was faulty, but it sounds like they f*** up when they built the system. It seems to be OK now though.
Phenom II 965
Radeon 6870
Antec 620 high current gamer power supply
Asus M5A88-V Evo board
8GB RAM 1600Mhz Ripjaws
Everything new, nothing over-clocked.
The are two problems, right from the day I brought it home, always when I play any games.
First, the computer will often lock up. It's an intermittent problem, completely random. Sometimes I'll play for 10 minutes and it freezes, other times I'll play for hours before a lockup, or sometimes it just works and doesn't freeeze at all. When it locks up, there is no sound and no response to the keyboard. I need to hold down the power button to turn it off and on again. Once I get it
rebooted, I can continue gaming as if nothing happened. There is nothing in the Windows Event Viewer to indicate what the problem is.
The other problem playing games, far less frequent but just as random, is that the computer will turn itself off. I can turn it back on without issues.
It's too random to be overheating, plus I've kept an eye on CPU, mobo and video card temps, nothing out of the ordinary there.
Some of the things I've tried were downclockig the memory to 1333 so that the memory controller would not be overclocked. I've also adjusted the RAM timings to match what is recomended for AMD CPUs. I've updated the BIOS a couple times, and everything else should have up-to-date drivers. I've also tried giving the CPU a slight voltage bump (from 1.4 to 1.42), no help there.
I've run various tests (Memtest, prime95, furmark, all three at the same time) but nothing seems to trigger a problem like a game does, but since it's random, who knows for sure. I didn't let these run for more than a couple hours, I suppose I could let them run longer...
At first I suspected faulty power supply. I decided to see what would happen if I downclocked the CPU and video card. CPU normally runs at 3.4 Ghz, I capped it at 2.7. The video card normally runs at 900, I capped it at 825. When running with these settings, I never encountered an issue. I had it set like this for over a week, so even though it's random, I'm confident it's stable with these settings.
Next I tried downclocking just the video card, but putting the CPU back to default speed. These settings were not stable, I still got lock ups.
When I switched it (CPU downclocked to 2.7 again and video card back to normal), the system was stable.
My conclusion from this was that I had a faulty CPU. I thought I could narrow it down to a particular core, so I started assigning game threads to particular cores with the CPU back to full speed.
The game I'm playing now is Star Wars: The Old Republic. It has two main threads, I can lock each one to a particular core. For example, one on core 0, the other on core 1, leaving the other cores idle. Unfortunately, I tried every core extensively, they all seem OK. The PC never seems to lock up like this. (If I don't set the affinity to particular cores, the threads just seem to bounce from core to core at random and the PC will eventually lock up.)
So.. any thoughts? Bad CPU? Maybe the L3 cache or something else outside the cores is not quite right? Any help is appreciated.
Thanks
April 4th update: It still hasn't been resolved but I'll keep this post updated in case it helps someone else. I can rule out the power supply, as I tried a different one in the system for a few days and I still had three freezes and one shutdown in that time. Before that I also tried adjusting the RAM voltage to 1.55 (auto is 1.5) with the RAM downclocked at the same time, that didn't seem to help. I am virtually certain it's the CPU or mobo, hopefully I'll find out which one soon. (AMD CPU and ASUS mobo combination seems rather popular for showing up in threads like this one.)
May 8th final update: The shop replaced the board and the cpu. They said the cpu had excess thermal paste and something about bent pins (?). So I guess I'll never know if the mobo or cpu was faulty, but it sounds like they f*** up when they built the system. It seems to be OK now though.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram