[blukatz92]

Okay, so I've got two issues with my homebuilt desktop:

1. While gaming, my PC will randomly freeze (as in a system hang), with a hard reboot being the only way to regain control. (Holding down the power button to reset) I have monitored my temps, but the highest CPU I've seen is 49C, and the highest GPU I've seen is 71C. I have tried reinstalling Windows, each game individually and all my drivers. I have opened my case up, cleaned out dust, reseated my RAM and GPU, checked the cable connections for my PSU. My fans are running fine. When I first built my PC about a year ago, I had run multiple tests with Memtest and Prime95 (overnight) with no errors. Furmark runs fine. I cannot reproduce the freeze at will, sometimes it'll happen within minutes of turning on a game, sometimes days between freezes. I checked the event viewer, but the only warnings or errors to pop up involved 'an unexpected shutdown has occurred', which is caused by me pressing the power button to turn it off. When the freeze occurs, I lose all input from mouse/keyboard, whatever image is on the screen is stuck there. Now here's where I wonder if my GPU is possibly the issue- I have Realtek onboard audio and AMD's HDMI audio. When I have sound coming from HDMI, when the freeze happens I hear a repetitive clicking noise that is loud and annoying (almost as if the last bit of sound before the freeze is repeating rapidly). If I'm using the Realtek audio (headphones plugged into the case directly) then there's no sound at all. I have a Radeon HD 6850 now, I have an old Nvidia 9600GT that I've tried using, and my motherboard has a built in HD4250, all produce the same results. This tells me that the GPU probably is not the issue (despite the HDMI sound bug).

2. A handful of times recently, my desktop has randomly shut down on me (even when I was currently using it, so I know it's not a power plan taking effect). Again, I cannot reproduce this, but this happens far less often, only two or three times so far. My monitor stops getting a signal, then a few moments later the fans and case LEDs quit. I press the power button and nothing happens. I wait 10 seconds, try again, nothing. Not sure if it was a good idea or not, but I also tried unplugging the power chord from the tower and the surge protector, then plugging them back in. It still won't boot up. After another minute or so, I try again and it boots up. Goes straight to the windows desktop with no password (I have one set up) and ready to go, with no error messages. Event viewer doesn't even recognize any problems. It's almost like it went into sleep mode, because my programs would still be active and where I left off with no lost data (despite unplugging the power chord). The only way this makes sense is for the computer to be saving the open programs to disk like in hibernate, or to RAM like in sleep, but usually removing power should wipe my RAM. I'm not pressing any key combinations to do this, and sometimes it happens when I'm not actually at my PC, so this really confuses me. Any ideas?

Here's my setup-
AMD Phenom ii X4 970BE (not currently OC)
ASUS M5A88-V EVO
AMD Radeon HD 6850
G.Skill Ripjaw X Series 8GB (2x4GB)
OCZ ZS Series 650W PSU
Seagate 500GB HDD
NZXT Phantom 410 (with one extra 120mm fan on the side panel)

[mjd420nova]

This sure does sound like a power suply. You've checked the most likely suspects except one. The CPU and heat sink and the heat conducting di-electric compound between them. This could account for lock-ups. The drops of power as observed points back to the PS.

[waldojim]

By all rights and respects, the power supply does sound suspect, but I would probably say that the BIOS or drivers are more likely to blame.

One way to test the power supply is with OCCT and HW Monitor (a mufti-meter would be best, but HW monitor will do for the most part). Basically, if you have a multimeter handy, then connect it to the yellow and black wires of any connector, set the meter for DC power with at least a 12V range. Once you have the software or meter in place, fire up OCCT in power supply stress test mode. That will place the maximum draw against the PSU possible. Now, your 12V rail is likely to drop a little anyhow. To be safe, it shouldn't drop below 11.6V..

Now, if you make it through more than an hour of the OCCT power supply stress test with normal voltage levels, and without crashing, then your PSU is good.

More than once, I have seen some very interesting compatibility problems when it comes to AMD boards. These have become increasingly frequent... There is no decent way to check for this, so what I will suggest, is using Linux, and a long running benchmark like linpack. Linux is known for two things, one, sensitivity to minor problems. Two, a beautiful log telling you what it is seeing.

[blukatz92]

@mjd420nova- You're referring to the CPU heatsink and thermal compound, correct? Wouldn't that be a temperature issue is that wasn't set properly? I'm using the stock fan/heatsink/compound that AMD provides with the CPU, but I'm not experiencing high temps according to Speedfan and Coretemp. AMD specification say that the Phenoms can run fine up to 62C. The hottest I've ever seen was 56C during Prime95 stress tests, so I would imagine that my thermal compound and heatsink should be fine.

@waldojim- I've updated my BIOS once, from version 1001 to 1302, although there are two newer versions. Both state they improve system stability, so I might give that a try again. I've reinstalled all my drivers, so I doubt it's from that, unless I've downloaded a bad driver twice. I have HW Monitor, but not OCCT. I'll give that a try, how exactly does it differ from Prime95?

[waldojim]

Prime 95 only uses a specific formula against the CPU, stressing the CPU alone. To be honest, Intel Burn test, and OCCT have much better CPU burn-in testing. But none of the others have a PSU test like OCCT. OCCT will stress everything you have at once, and give an unrealistically heavy power draw - trying to convince the PSU to screw up.

[rgreen4]

My experience with power supplies is that a weak one will typically give more problems during the boot process with the strain of the start up process of all the components and devices. The operating load is lower than the boot load. Of course a failed PSU will not even let the machine boot. That being said, it has been at least a decade since I have actually had a PSU fail or get weak on me. The only way to know for sure is to replace the PSU, worst case it does not fix it and you now have a spare PSU (unless you can borrow one from a friend who has a spare). Years ago I had a PC on my desk at work that out of the blue while updating something, it would just reboot. It was infuriating and I got to the point where I would save my updated about every five minutes. The IT staff felt it was a bad memory module and replace both, but it continued until they finally replace the machine.

The fact that you have to unplug the PC from the power source leads me in another direction. That is a rather extreme situation and usually only occurs in a major conflict within the BIOS/Drivers/OS. (This is one disadvantage of having the power cycle controlled by the BIOS and motherboard. In the old day the power button was an actual switch, but then we had to wait for the OS to cycle down and physically turn off the switch).

If this were my PC, I would strip it down to the basics, including using the onboard video and minimum memory (only two sticks) and would not even put a HD in it. I use an old Ubuntu distro disk for the "smoke test" on the initial boot of a new build. We are talking MB/CPU/Memory and a DVD drive and run the machine for a bit and see what happens. If it is stable in its operation, then add more pieces back to the puzzle. If you have a spare HD that has no critical or important data on it, I would put it in and reinstall the OS from scratch. Then make any changes you want in the video. Then again if it is stable, add the applications and games - one at a time - letting it run for a while between each one. If it acts up again, then you have found your weak link in the last addition.

This post has been edited by rgreen4: 03 December 2012 - 09:41 AM

[blukatz92]

Okay, ran the main OCCT test, the GPU test and the PSU test. Highest CPU temp was 59C, highest GPU was 71C and there were no errors or issues of any kind. (as I figured) I ran each test on infinite mode in 1920x1080 (for the GPU tests) and large data for the CPU. It's ironic, really. Normally a person should be happy that their computer is passing all these tests with flying colors, yet it's annoying me. I mean, the tests are supposed to be stressing the system way harder than normal operating use should ever push it, so I suppose if anything, this is telling me that my hardware is not the issue. I've already done a full reinstall of Windows once, and I've gone through my drivers countless times. (I use the safe mode clean install for some of the drivers such as GPU). I've even done a clean boot (disabling all the unnecessary startup programs through msconfig).

@rgreen4- Don't know enough about Ubuntu to know for sure, but can you install Windows based games (such as from Steam) onto it? The system runs great in the Windows environment, it's only when gaming that I encounter issues. I've let stress tests run overnight (I've done 24hr. tests multiple times) so I know the system is stable there. It's only when I boot up games like Skyrim, Sonic Generations, Assassin's Creed II, etc. that I experience these issues. I have a steam copy of Sonic 3 (from the Genesis) that never has issues, so it's only the larger games. I've used 3 different GPUs all with the same result. They all use different drivers (at least, the Nvidia card against the AMDs would) so I'm not sure what other software aspect to check.

[rgreen4]

I am not advocating running Ubuntu as the main OS although if that's what you want, that's fine. As a Linux distro it won't run games and applications written to run under Windows.

I was advocating running it from the CD as a test event, although since you posted subsequently that you do not encounter a problem until you run a game, there is no point in running Ubuntu as a test. I just use the CD to test new builds before I put the HD in as obviously the machine will not run without an OS and Windows will not run from the DVD.

This post has been edited by rgreen4: 03 December 2012 - 08:32 PM

[blukatz92]

Yeah, that's what I figured. Thanks for the idea though! It really is frustrating though. Everything is pointing to a hardware failure, but all my components pass their respective stress tests with no errors regardless of how many times or how long I run them. I would say software is the issue, but I can't think of any unifying thing software-wise that is unique to those games. My Steam Genesis collection and Morrowind run fine. Oblivion, Skyrim, Dirt 3, Assassin's Creed, all the more modern games are the ones where my system hangs. If it was an OS issue, I would imagine that at some point, my computer should lock up even in the windows environment. If it was a video driver, then all my games would probably be having this issue. Sound drivers couldn't be it because I use both Realtek and AMD depending on whether I'm using the speakers in my TV over HDMI or headphones directly in the case. The clicking noise I hear when the system hangs only occurs when I'm using the HDMI signal, so that suggests maybe the GPU is at fault, but that happens with both my discreet cards and the integrated one. (They all can do HDMI) I've also used two different HDDs (only using one, the other is IDE and I'd like to avoid having that airflow-blocking cable out of my case).

[waldojim]

blukatz92, on 03 December 2012 - 05:53 PM, said:

Okay, ran the main OCCT test, the GPU test and the PSU test. Highest CPU temp was 59C, highest GPU was 71C and there were no errors or issues of any kind. (as I figured) I ran each test on infinite mode in 1920x1080 (for the GPU tests) and large data for the CPU. It's ironic, really. Normally a person should be happy that their computer is passing all these tests with flying colors, yet it's annoying me. I mean, the tests are supposed to be stressing the system way harder than normal operating use should ever push it, so I suppose if anything, this is telling me that my hardware is not the issue. I've already done a full reinstall of Windows once, and I've gone through my drivers countless times. (I use the safe mode clean install for some of the drivers such as GPU). I've even done a clean boot (disabling all the unnecessary startup programs through msconfig).

@rgreen4- Don't know enough about Ubuntu to know for sure, but can you install Windows based games (such as from Steam) onto it? The system runs great in the Windows environment, it's only when gaming that I encounter issues. I've let stress tests run overnight (I've done 24hr. tests multiple times) so I know the system is stable there. It's only when I boot up games like Skyrim, Sonic Generations, Assassin's Creed II, etc. that I experience these issues. I have a steam copy of Sonic 3 (from the Genesis) that never has issues, so it's only the larger games. I've used 3 different GPUs all with the same result. They all use different drivers (at least, the Nvidia card against the AMDs would) so I'm not sure what other software aspect to check.

If your system passes the OCCT PSU test, then your hardware is fine. At this stage, we need to be looking specifically at software. As the hardware is clean, don't worry about stripping the machine, or running Linux, as it is unnecessary. At this stage, you need to start looking at Windows, drivers, 3rd party software and so on.

I would say start with a Windows 'refresh'. Use your boot CD, and have it rewrite the core Windows files. This should leave all your documents in place, though you will need to reinstall most software. Take your time installing drivers. Grab up the important ones first, install the offending games and test with core drivers only. This would usually be the video card, chipset, network, and sound drivers. Then add in additional software from there, testing after each software install.

[blukatz92]

I've already tried doing a full system restore, and I've done a repair installation once. I'm not sure what windows refresh you're speaking of, but it sounds similar to a full restore with the windows.old backup. The repair install does something similar as well, but leaves your files and programs intact. I'd like to avoid doing a full system restore again, mostly because I have a terrible internet connection here and it takes forever to download anything. It probably literally take a week or two to reinstall the handful of steam games I have, and Old Republic took almost two days by itself. I think I still have an old WD IDE drive sitting around somewhere, maybe I should pull that back out and give it a fresh windows install. Give the important drivers and software only thing a try. I have a physical copy of Skyrim, which is one of the worst with the freezes.

[blukatz92]

Okay, so don't have the drive with me, it'll be another week or so before I'll be able to get it (it's at home and I have another week and a half of classes, then I'm going home) so haven't been able to test anything yet. This is more of an update that slightly concerns me, because I just had one of the system hangs when I wasn't gaming. I had three google chrome tabs and windows media player running, and that's all. Soooooo... yeah.....

[blukatz92]

Update: I think I may have found the issue, but I'm currently having problems with fixing it. Okay, so I was looking around google and came across someone with the same type of system freeze that I'm having. He solved his issue by running the Driver Verifier that comes with Windows 7. So, I ran it and immediately upon reboot, blue screen. (I did not get fully into windows, it was still on the bootup screen)
Anyways, ran Bluescreenview program to read the dmp file created by the crash, and it tells me my DAEMON tools driver caused the crash. I don't really use it anymore, no big loss, so I uninstall it. Well, there was one other thing that happened... my GPU driver was removed. I did nothing to manually remove it, and the dmp file does not reference anything to do with video drivers. (Only the DAEMON tools driver was suspect) I redownloaded the 12.10 drivers from AMD's site, but my GPU is no longer detected by my system. Windows has defaulted to using the generic drivers, which means as of the current moment, I can't even run most of my games. I've tried installing the drivers twice to no avail. I also fully uninstalled catalyst then reinstalled a third time, still nothing. Device manager see my video card (it's listed under Display Adapaters as AMD Radeon 6800 series, but Catalyst isn't seeing it. There's an exclamation mark next to the Radeon's entry in DM, so I tried manually installing the driver, rather than using the .exe file from AMD. It gave me a list of drivers to choose from, and it showed me 8 drivers listed specifically for the 6800 series from various previous versions. Is there a way to clean out the old versions? I'm wondering if they might be causing errors, even if they aren't the active drivers.

EDIT: Might as well add, I am still unable to install the Catalyst drivers from my Radeon, the driver software update has the loading bar and says it's installing, but it never finishes, usually it stops and says the installation timed out.

This post has been edited by blukatz92: 19 December 2012 - 10:05 PM

[waldojim]

blukatz92, on 19 December 2012 - 09:56 PM, said:

Update: I think I may have found the issue, but I'm currently having problems with fixing it. Okay, so I was looking around google and came across someone with the same type of system freeze that I'm having. He solved his issue by running the Driver Verifier that comes with Windows 7. So, I ran it and immediately upon reboot, blue screen. (I did not get fully into windows, it was still on the bootup screen)
Anyways, ran Bluescreenview program to read the dmp file created by the crash, and it tells me my DAEMON tools driver caused the crash. I don't really use it anymore, no big loss, so I uninstall it. Well, there was one other thing that happened... my GPU driver was removed. I did nothing to manually remove it, and the dmp file does not reference anything to do with video drivers. (Only the DAEMON tools driver was suspect) I redownloaded the 12.10 drivers from AMD's site, but my GPU is no longer detected by my system. Windows has defaulted to using the generic drivers, which means as of the current moment, I can't even run most of my games. I've tried installing the drivers twice to no avail. I also fully uninstalled catalyst then reinstalled a third time, still nothing. Device manager see my video card (it's listed under Display Adapaters as AMD Radeon 6800 series, but Catalyst isn't seeing it. There's an exclamation mark next to the Radeon's entry in DM, so I tried manually installing the driver, rather than using the .exe file from AMD. It gave me a list of drivers to choose from, and it showed me 8 drivers listed specifically for the 6800 series from various previous versions. Is there a way to clean out the old versions? I'm wondering if they might be causing errors, even if they aren't the active drivers.

EDIT: Might as well add, I am still unable to install the Catalyst drivers from my Radeon, the driver software update has the loading bar and says it's installing, but it never finishes, usually it stops and says the installation timed out.

Use driver sweeper. You can find it here.

Before you run it, ensure that all of your current video drivers are completely uninstalled (as far as Windows is concerned anyhow.

[blukatz92]

Any particular reason for that? Or is that a requirement to run Driver Sweeper?
(The video driver thing, that is)

This post has been edited by blukatz92: 20 December 2012 - 03:54 AM

[waldojim]

Driver sweeper deletes all traces of the drivers, you dont want Windows to think software should exist that does not.

[HetfieldJ]

Looks like a typical power supply issue. Am 90% it is one!

[FascistNation]

HetfieldJ, on 23 December 2012 - 10:19 AM, said:

Looks like a typical power supply issue. Am 90% it is one!

Me too. The proposed solutions have good merit in not costing anything but time.

But it has been an interesting thread to read including the declaration of solving something by reading a proposed solution on the Internet rather than actually doing it and then declaring victory when it succeeds. Everybody gets a trophy these days I guess.

This post has been edited by FascistNation: 23 December 2012 - 10:57 AM

[waldojim]

FascistNation, on 23 December 2012 - 10:55 AM, said:

HetfieldJ, on 23 December 2012 - 10:19 AM, said:

Looks like a typical power supply issue. Am 90% it is one!

Me too. The proposed solutions have good merit in not costing anything but time.

But it has been an interesting thread to read including the declaration of solving something by reading a proposed solution on the Internet rather than actually doing it and then declaring victory when it succeeds. Everybody gets a trophy these days I guess.

So your answer is to ignore all the testing that has been done, ignore the fact that the power supply is perfectly stable under unreasonable loads (as you will likely never see the system at 100% power draw) and buy a new power supply because "free" testing is irrelevant?

Like I have told others here, either be helpful, or don't post. The testing indicates his power supply is perfectly fine. He also has a far larger power supply than his system needs. Unless you have some sound logic why you believe that OCCT PSU test didn't find an underlying problem, you are in no position to suggest anyone replace parts.

[blukatz92]

Okay, so I uninstalled my graphic drivers and ran Driversweeper in Safe Mode. It found several previous AMD drivers as well as a few Nvidia drivers from my old 9600. When I returned to the regular boot, Windows installed its default drivers for graphics. It showed up as a VGA compatible video controller in device manager, so I tried installing Catalyst, but for whatever reason it didn't detect my Radeon, and so no drivers were installed, just Catalyst. I spent the next couple hours trying to get my computer to recognize my card, which it eventually did. It was a pain though, I had the .exe installer from AMD's site, I tried using device manager to automatically search for updates, Windows Update even had a driver to install for my card. I also used device manager's manual driver installation a couple times, pointing it at the folder the 12.10 files were at. It finally worked after several tries, but I still wonder why it took so much effort to get the drivers to install. In any case, it's up and running fine now.

Something that came up recently, Skyrim won't start anymore. Well, it starts, but I can't see it. It shows up as a process in Task Manager, but not as an application. So it's using resources, but there's no windows that I can view it. It doesn't show up on the task bar, and it's not in the Alt-Tab menu. I've rebooted the computer, used Steam's verification tool to check the installation files, and disabled my recent mods, but nothing works. Not sure what caused this, but I'm probably just going to have to reinstall the game.

I got a 3TB Barracuda for Christmas, so everything vital has been backed up. So far, I haven't had another system freeze since I replaced my graphic drivers last night, but I'm not ready to call this solved yet. If I get a freeze again, I'm going to reinstall Windows again, otherwise, we'll see what happens from here. Thanks for all your help so far, by the way!