Alright guys. I've got an annoying problem with a PC goin' on here. I'll give you the specs first:
Windows 7
Core i5 2500
Asrock P67 Extreme4 Gen3
AMD Radeon HD6950
Corsair DDR3-1600
*New* Corsair CX600M
*New* Samsung EVO 120 GB
WD 500 GB
I've been trying to fix a friend's PC for the past little while now, because apparently her PC has had ongoing issues before I knew her. The story is: Her PC started acting funky shortly after she moved into her current apartment almost 2 years ago now. Her PC was originally built 3 years ago.
The problem: Every once in awhile, more so while gaming, her PC will essentially lock-up. We can usually force it to happen by opening up a couple of games, many tabs, youtube, spotify, and skype. But most of the time it occurs while she is in-game and just has music running or skype open. Sometimes the audio will accompany with the annoying looping sound. This is a hard lock-up: no inputs are being accepted during this time. Also, if left alone, it will eventually respond about a few minutes later. All temperatures were in-line.
My initial thoughts: bad graphics card (it is AMD after all
). So, I took out my 770 GTX and threw her card in my PC. Seemed to run fine, no issues. Even overclocked it a bit and ran Unigine Heaven at extreme for awhile to stress it. Temps peaked around 70C. So, it doesn't really seem to be the card..?
I also threw in a spare hard drive and loaded a fresh copy of win 7 to check if it was a software/driver related issue. Nope.
I ran memtest on a few different occasions, with the longest running for about 6 hours. I'd be surprised if it was the memory. Memory errors usually blue screen and crash completely.
The part that confuses me is that when I try to throw in my old 285 GTX OC in her PC, most of the time it wouldn't even POST. It would power the fans up and all, but no video signal. A few times it would work, but when it did, I tried to stress the GPU, and then the screen lost video signal again. This led me to believe that the PSU wasn't delivering enough power on the 12V rail. The 285 GTX OC requires a higher power load compared to the 6950. Plus, there was a ton of dust build up on the dust filter -- thought maybe the PSU had an overheating issue at some point in its life.
So, we replaced the old Thermaltake 750W a new 600W PSU. Also bought a nice, new Corsair case (her old case was just annoying), and an SSD to just help top it off. I throw it all together, and went to town cleaning all of her old components. They had some serious dust build-up.
After completing the new build, it was seeming to run fine at my place. No freezing, ran stress tests, checked temps, and even spent a night gaming on it.
AS SOON as she brought it back to her room at her place, it locked-up the same way it always does on the first game of Smite she played. So, I down-clocked her GPU and CPU. I used Afterburner to lower the power & voltage. This seemed to help for one day of gaming. Didn't last long until it froze again.
At this point, I'm thinking shit, maybe it's the circuit she's on. Maybe a bad surge protector, or outlet. We replaced her outlet with a new one, and ran it without the surge protector. Not the problem. So, I had her bring her PC out to her living room. It seemed to be the culprit at first, with going a whole night gaming with no freezing issues. But, the next night it froze again.
I also noticed in the event viewer error with: "Event filter with query "SELECT * FROM_InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_processor" AND TargetInstance. Load Percentage >99 could not be reactivated in namespace"// ./root/CIMV2" because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter unitl the problem is corrected" ID 10 kept appearing whenever this lockup occurred.
My goal was to fix and upgrade her PC without her spending all too much money on parts she doesn't necessarily have to replace. If her GPU is fine, I'd rather have her hold on to the 6950 until NVIDIA releases their Maxwell's. At this point, I'm thinking it is probably the motherboard that is bad now -- due to my 285 GTX not behaving properly in her PC. If so, I'm thinking of having her wait a month and just getting a next-gen Haswell i5 with the next-gen chip set mobo.
Any thoughts and opinions on the matter? I've built and repair quite a few systems, but have never had this much trouble isolating the exact culprit. Thanks for the time reading through that all. Appreciated.
Windows 7
Core i5 2500
Asrock P67 Extreme4 Gen3
AMD Radeon HD6950
Corsair DDR3-1600
*New* Corsair CX600M
*New* Samsung EVO 120 GB
WD 500 GB
I've been trying to fix a friend's PC for the past little while now, because apparently her PC has had ongoing issues before I knew her. The story is: Her PC started acting funky shortly after she moved into her current apartment almost 2 years ago now. Her PC was originally built 3 years ago.
The problem: Every once in awhile, more so while gaming, her PC will essentially lock-up. We can usually force it to happen by opening up a couple of games, many tabs, youtube, spotify, and skype. But most of the time it occurs while she is in-game and just has music running or skype open. Sometimes the audio will accompany with the annoying looping sound. This is a hard lock-up: no inputs are being accepted during this time. Also, if left alone, it will eventually respond about a few minutes later. All temperatures were in-line.
My initial thoughts: bad graphics card (it is AMD after all
). So, I took out my 770 GTX and threw her card in my PC. Seemed to run fine, no issues. Even overclocked it a bit and ran Unigine Heaven at extreme for awhile to stress it. Temps peaked around 70C. So, it doesn't really seem to be the card..? I also threw in a spare hard drive and loaded a fresh copy of win 7 to check if it was a software/driver related issue. Nope.
I ran memtest on a few different occasions, with the longest running for about 6 hours. I'd be surprised if it was the memory. Memory errors usually blue screen and crash completely.
The part that confuses me is that when I try to throw in my old 285 GTX OC in her PC, most of the time it wouldn't even POST. It would power the fans up and all, but no video signal. A few times it would work, but when it did, I tried to stress the GPU, and then the screen lost video signal again. This led me to believe that the PSU wasn't delivering enough power on the 12V rail. The 285 GTX OC requires a higher power load compared to the 6950. Plus, there was a ton of dust build up on the dust filter -- thought maybe the PSU had an overheating issue at some point in its life.
So, we replaced the old Thermaltake 750W a new 600W PSU. Also bought a nice, new Corsair case (her old case was just annoying), and an SSD to just help top it off. I throw it all together, and went to town cleaning all of her old components. They had some serious dust build-up.
After completing the new build, it was seeming to run fine at my place. No freezing, ran stress tests, checked temps, and even spent a night gaming on it.
AS SOON as she brought it back to her room at her place, it locked-up the same way it always does on the first game of Smite she played. So, I down-clocked her GPU and CPU. I used Afterburner to lower the power & voltage. This seemed to help for one day of gaming. Didn't last long until it froze again.
At this point, I'm thinking shit, maybe it's the circuit she's on. Maybe a bad surge protector, or outlet. We replaced her outlet with a new one, and ran it without the surge protector. Not the problem. So, I had her bring her PC out to her living room. It seemed to be the culprit at first, with going a whole night gaming with no freezing issues. But, the next night it froze again.
I also noticed in the event viewer error with: "Event filter with query "SELECT * FROM_InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_processor" AND TargetInstance. Load Percentage >99 could not be reactivated in namespace"// ./root/CIMV2" because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter unitl the problem is corrected" ID 10 kept appearing whenever this lockup occurred.
My goal was to fix and upgrade her PC without her spending all too much money on parts she doesn't necessarily have to replace. If her GPU is fine, I'd rather have her hold on to the 6950 until NVIDIA releases their Maxwell's. At this point, I'm thinking it is probably the motherboard that is bad now -- due to my 285 GTX not behaving properly in her PC. If so, I'm thinking of having her wait a month and just getting a next-gen Haswell i5 with the next-gen chip set mobo.
Any thoughts and opinions on the matter? I've built and repair quite a few systems, but have never had this much trouble isolating the exact culprit. Thanks for the time reading through that all. Appreciated.
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