Am I expecting too much or is something wrong? Occasional red screen of death!

RockyRacoon

Honorable
Mar 13, 2013
9
0
10,510
Hi everyone,

I'm having a problem with my recent new build. Here is the specification(all running at stock speed):

AMD Phenon x4 965
GIGABYTE GA-970A-DS3
8gb dual channel mushkin silverline memory
VTX-3D X-Edition HD7870
OCZ ZS 550W power supply
Windows 8

My problem:
1) There seems to be very low performance from the CPU. In 3Dmark11, I am getting about 1-2fps in the physics test. It also fails to load the combined test so I have not managed to post a score.
Unigene heaven benchmark score also seems to be about half of what I might expect from reading reviews of the graphics card.

2) Occasionally I get a red screen of death. No text or anything, the screen just goes red and the computer restarts. This happens at exactly the same moment of the 3Dmark demo benchmark every time, and also occasionally when I close games.

The GPU temperature has never gone above 62degrees, and my CPU generally averages around 50 under load.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance for the advice!