- Oct 9, 2012
- 9
- 0
- 10,510
Hi! Take a deep breath, this is going to be a long one. So about 9 months ago I built a gaming PC. Specs are at the bottom of this post. Then a couple of months ago I bought a second monitor and it was shortly after this that all my troubles began. The new monitor is a 22" samsung HD monitor and I also have a 19" SD monitor connected as well. I don't think this is the problem however, merely a coincidence. I thought I would let you know just in case.
The problem itself is that my computer spontaneously crashes. At first it was just while I was playing games but it didn't seem to crash at any one game in particular or even games that are particularly resource hungry. During these early days it even crashed while playing a flash game. The one thing it appeared to have in common was 3D graphics so I removed my graphics card and took it to a friend who has a very similar build to me and he tested it for a whole week without incident. During this time without the graphics card my computer continued to crash so that was one thing ticked off the list (my mobo has onboard graphics).
The next thing I tested was the RAM. I left memtest to run overnight first on both sticks of RAM together then on each stick of RAM individually and in various different DIMM slots. No runs produced any errors.
I then turned to software. In fact my initial bit of troubleshooting had me doing graphics driver sweeps and reinstalling before I looked at any hardware problems. I have experienced the crashing problem on two separate installs of Windows 7 with and without the service pack. I also tried reinstalling directx and the .NET framework as that was suggested somewhere. This however led to more frequent crashes which prompted a system restore that seemed to get it back to a less frequent level of crashing.
I have also updated the BIOS but it had no effect. I have carefully monitored the system temperatures during prolonged gameplay and the hottest I have seen anything is my GPU at 58C. I have also monitored the voltages for each rail from the PSU (using speedFan) and these remained within a 2% margin of their expected values. I realise testing these voltages with a voltmeter would be more exact but I don't have one!
This is where my knowledge of trouble shooting the problem ends so I'll elaborate a bit more on the problem itself. As I said before it started happening while playing games. The PC would just freeze up, the picture would freeze and it wouldn't respond to any commands. Sometimes it would continue making noise like the last fraction of a second of sound was playing over and over. Recently however it has started giving me the BSOD and happening more frequently when I'm not playing games. It seems the gaming part could have been a coincidence as I play games an awful lot and the graphics really have nothing to do with it after all. One time the BSOD gave me a code relating to directx which is what prompted me to try reinstalling it. All the other times however it gives me different error codes and I'm not sure what they relate to. Just this evening it gave me a new blue screen I haven't seen before, it just said that there is a hardware fault and that I should contact my hardware supplier. One final thing is that after it crashes and I turn off the machine by holding down the power button the backlight on my keyboard remains on. It will stay on indefinitely unless I flick the switch on the PSU. This has led me to believe that either the PSU or the way the mobo sends power to things is the problem.
All crashes have been experienced in windows 7. I have not yet experienced one while booted into my Ubuntu partition. I don't use Ubuntu as much and it could just be a coincidence. This machine is primarily for games, I have other linux machines that I use for work.
Any ideas or possible trouble shooting methods would be greatly appreciated as I'm all out of any myself.
The specs:
PSU: Thermaltake 700W TR2
MoBo: Asus M5A 88-M evo
CPU: AMD phenom II x4
GPU: Saphire 2GB Radeon HD6950
RAM: 2x4GB Corsair Vengence 1600MHz
optical drive: basic Asus DVD-RW drive
HDD: 1TB seagate barracuda
OS: Windows 7 64-bit ultimate and Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit
The problem itself is that my computer spontaneously crashes. At first it was just while I was playing games but it didn't seem to crash at any one game in particular or even games that are particularly resource hungry. During these early days it even crashed while playing a flash game. The one thing it appeared to have in common was 3D graphics so I removed my graphics card and took it to a friend who has a very similar build to me and he tested it for a whole week without incident. During this time without the graphics card my computer continued to crash so that was one thing ticked off the list (my mobo has onboard graphics).
The next thing I tested was the RAM. I left memtest to run overnight first on both sticks of RAM together then on each stick of RAM individually and in various different DIMM slots. No runs produced any errors.
I then turned to software. In fact my initial bit of troubleshooting had me doing graphics driver sweeps and reinstalling before I looked at any hardware problems. I have experienced the crashing problem on two separate installs of Windows 7 with and without the service pack. I also tried reinstalling directx and the .NET framework as that was suggested somewhere. This however led to more frequent crashes which prompted a system restore that seemed to get it back to a less frequent level of crashing.
I have also updated the BIOS but it had no effect. I have carefully monitored the system temperatures during prolonged gameplay and the hottest I have seen anything is my GPU at 58C. I have also monitored the voltages for each rail from the PSU (using speedFan) and these remained within a 2% margin of their expected values. I realise testing these voltages with a voltmeter would be more exact but I don't have one!
This is where my knowledge of trouble shooting the problem ends so I'll elaborate a bit more on the problem itself. As I said before it started happening while playing games. The PC would just freeze up, the picture would freeze and it wouldn't respond to any commands. Sometimes it would continue making noise like the last fraction of a second of sound was playing over and over. Recently however it has started giving me the BSOD and happening more frequently when I'm not playing games. It seems the gaming part could have been a coincidence as I play games an awful lot and the graphics really have nothing to do with it after all. One time the BSOD gave me a code relating to directx which is what prompted me to try reinstalling it. All the other times however it gives me different error codes and I'm not sure what they relate to. Just this evening it gave me a new blue screen I haven't seen before, it just said that there is a hardware fault and that I should contact my hardware supplier. One final thing is that after it crashes and I turn off the machine by holding down the power button the backlight on my keyboard remains on. It will stay on indefinitely unless I flick the switch on the PSU. This has led me to believe that either the PSU or the way the mobo sends power to things is the problem.
All crashes have been experienced in windows 7. I have not yet experienced one while booted into my Ubuntu partition. I don't use Ubuntu as much and it could just be a coincidence. This machine is primarily for games, I have other linux machines that I use for work.
Any ideas or possible trouble shooting methods would be greatly appreciated as I'm all out of any myself.
The specs:
PSU: Thermaltake 700W TR2
MoBo: Asus M5A 88-M evo
CPU: AMD phenom II x4
GPU: Saphire 2GB Radeon HD6950
RAM: 2x4GB Corsair Vengence 1600MHz
optical drive: basic Asus DVD-RW drive
HDD: 1TB seagate barracuda
OS: Windows 7 64-bit ultimate and Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit
It has a VGA input. I have done a driver sweep from safe mode before but I still kept the two monitors connected. I'll try it again now with just the new monitor and see if I can get it to crash afterwards. I'll keep you posted!
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