System Crashes

liamf1986

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Dec 15, 2011
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Hello,

I've recently built my new PC, specs below, it frequently crashes though.

CPU: Intel Core i5 2500k
Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD53 (b3)
Graphics: XFX HD 6790
RAM: 8gb Corsair DDR 3
Harddrive: 120gb Corsair Force Seris 3 SSD
PSU: 550W Antec TruePower
OS: Windows 7 x64

Symptoms:
-Its not giving BSOD or anything the screen simply all defaults to one colour (Sometimes repeating vertical lines).
The color is rarely the same but as far as I can tell it is using one of the colors displayed on screen at the time of the crash.
-The sound locks on whatever it is doing at the time so its just continuous noise.
-Crashes mostly happen while looking around in windows. Generally at the exact point that I interact with something, like closing/minimising a window, typing into a text box, scrolling up/down a window.
-Only game I've played on it so far is wow, and swtor, as a tester. It has never crashed within game. Crashed once in the opening menu exactly as I pressed the accept button but thats it. I've played these games for hours in a row to see if it would.

"Remedy":
The only way to restore the machine is a hard reset. Interestingly the machine will auto boot up again after the hard reset, it only does this after the crash.

Steps taken:
-I've updated all the drivers I know of (for my motherboard I've done it manually and through the software provided, Live Update 5)
-Installed all Windows Updates
-Formatted and Re-installed windows
-I ran memtest for a couple of passes and it was ok, still need to do a full 7 pass test.
-Calculated my power supply, 550W should be enough.

Its really stumped me. Anyone have any ideas or seen anything similar?
 

jsrudd

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Jan 16, 2009
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This sounds like a video card problem to me. I had a 4850 that did this b/c it was over heating.

Do you get any sort of error and have you checked the log to see what happened?
 

liamf1986

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Dec 15, 2011
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Yeah windows is on the SSD. Don't have any other drives handy to test on atm.
 

liamf1986

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Dec 15, 2011
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I was thinking Graphics at first aswell. I've ran the card in another machine no problem, that was a vista 32bit installation though.

It doesn't give any errors. Which log do you mean?
I looked in ControlPanel>AdministrativeTools>EventViewer and managed to find the crash but couldn't make any sense of it. Gonna look at it again after work more thoroughly.
 

liamf1986

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Dec 15, 2011
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I eventually got to the bottom of this.

The SSD was crashing.

I RMA'd it got my replacement and it seems stable now.

Thanks for the replies.