Random Freezing in games/ at desktop

ChrisJust66 · Dec 27, 2007

Alright, this could be hardware related but I'm not sure. Thats why I'm here. I've recently built a new computer. Here are the parts: Intel core 2 duo, Asus p2n-32 premium using the onboard sound, 4 Gb corsair ram, 2x EVGA 8800 gt in sli. I had a creative audigy 2 in there but I was getting the SOD when using sli but I cleaned those drivers out. Here's the deal, whenever I play a game, i.e. Call of duty 4, crysis or bf 2142, my computer will freeze at random times. Today, for example, I loaded COD 4 up and it froze in the first 5 mins. And yes, I had just booted the computer up a few mins before. The night before that I was playing bf 2142 and it did it probably within the first 30 mins. So I had to restart and tried it again. Then it did it a few hours later. And the only way I can get it to restart is a hard restart. Ok, so maybe it's overheating I thought? But I looked at my logitech g15 keyboard and the clock was still ticking. I'm still not sure if it would be overheating or what. One other thing is I remember a few weeks ago I left crysis paused and I came back a little later and the computer froze on the pause screen. And it happened again on the desktop before to.
Sorry for this being so long but I like to be detailed. I hate having to go back and forth, taking 3 weeks to figure somthing out. But yeah, any ideas?

coolchris · Dec 27, 2007

Overheating...check the bios monitor of the motherboard. That gives the best results to see if it is a overheating problem. The cpu should be running about 26C unloaded.
You say you built it yourself...have you checked that all the Ram and other peripherels are seated correctly.? Have you installed the latest bios from Asus? Got all the latest drivers, including the Intel drivers for the motherboard from Intel?
Have you got a sufficient power supply?

Scotteq · Dec 27, 2007

Check the Reliability monitor for errors
Check Device Manager for notices

Intermittent problems can be a bear, tho...

ChrisJust66 · Dec 27, 2007

coolchris said:
Overheating...check the bios monitor of the motherboard. That gives the best results to see if it is a overheating problem. The cpu should be running about 26C unloaded.
You say you built it yourself...have you checked that all the Ram and other peripherels are seated correctly.? Have you installed the latest bios from Asus? Got all the latest drivers, including the Intel drivers for the motherboard from Intel?
Have you got a sufficient power supply?

You would think that if it was overheating, it wouldn't do it a few minutes into the game the first time and then do it a few hours later on the same game. But I haven't checked the temps yet. I usually load everest to check but I've had to reformat a few times figuring out if I wanted to use xp or vista. I just haven't gotten around to it but I will a little later today. Yes, all my internals are seated properly. This isn't my first computer I've built, so I know better to check that stuff. As far as the drivers for the cpu, well , I haven't checked. I had to move the computer yesterday into a different room and haven't hooked everything up yet, but I'll let you know as soon as I get it up and going. For my power supply, I'm pretty sure it's good. It's a new Cooler Master 1 Kw supply.

roy69 · Jan 2, 2008

If your cpu was overheating it would power down (if set in the bios).
Do as scotteq said to check for errors.
Also check your drivers, if your rig is a new build then load the drivers that came with the disk.
Check for any yellow or red icons in your device manager.
Check you have the correct ide,sata drivers as I have heard of this causing the problem you are discribing.
It sounds like a software error but with lockups it is very hard to say what is wrong.
Is it just doing it on games?

coolchris · Jan 3, 2008

Well I had a cpu that overheated and did not power down and was set to do so in bios. Depends on what the threshold is. I corrected this by putting more thermal compound on the cpu and it fixed the problem. It was doing exactly as the op described.
As shown by the various suggestions..its hard to pinpoint exactly the cause so the op needs to test each individual component one by one logically until its resolved. Hope you get it done mate. Let us know if you fixed it and how you did it.

farhaded · Jan 3, 2008

I am having a similar problem with my Medal of Honour (see my post for this) which also freezes 5-15 minutes into gameplay.
Have updated drivers for card plus game. I'm not sure heating is an issue as I render 3ds max on this machine for much longer and this typically uses 100% processor power right thru the rendering and I've not had any issues with overheating.
This is the first gme I've loaded, so I really don't know if its game fault or hardware fault.

Farhad

geezer10 · Jan 4, 2008

what i would do is first simplify your system - 1GB RAM and 1 graphics card

see if that works - if it does, then progressively add ram - if that works then its probably a SLI driver

if simple no go then:
- look at your hard drive connections - bad ide cable causes freezes

might want to flash BIOS also

and try stick of low voltage ram - corsair needs volts

PSU looks ok

Good Luck!

ChrisJust66 · Jan 6, 2008

Sorry I've been gone a while and haven't been able to even boot up my computer, let alone mess with it this last week. I'm going mess around with it and try your suggestions. I kinda doubt it's overheating because of the times at which it happens. I'm starting to wonder if it's just because of this motherboard. I've had big problems with my audigy 2 card not working with sli because of the 590i chip. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But any way, I'll get back to you in the next few days and give you an update.

ChrisJust66 · Jan 11, 2008

Ok I've got an update. I updated my sata drivers on sunday and I played BF 2142 (which dosn't really matter because as I said it happens on any game) for few hours on monday night, tuesday and thursday. Monday it ran fine for about 3 hours. I was going to stop playing but then I thought "I'll just play one more". Well guess what. Almost at the end of the round it froze. So I restarted my computer and started the game up again. In the middle of it starting, the game minimized and windows gave me an error box saying superfetch has a problem and is being shut down. So I thought that was weird and shut it down through services thinking something could be wrong with that. Started the game back up for a few minutes and the froze again. So I said screw it and went to bed.
On tuesday I logged back on to BF 2142 with superfetch still off and I played for 3 1/2 hours no problems what so ever. Turn the game off and went to bed.
Thursday got back on again. Played for about maybe 1 hour then bam! Froze

I was out of software ideas so I went on to hardware trouble shooting. Pulled 2 sticks of ram out (didn't want to pull 3 out since vista sucks with 1) and ran the game again. It froze after a while so I change those out with the other 2. It ran fine for the next hour that I played. I then installed all 4 sticks back in and ran Everest's stress test on the cpu, ram , and the cache. Went to bed and woke up today to find that it had locked up after about 8 mins. So I restarted it this morning, ran the stress test on just the ram and left for work. Came back and sure enough it froze after about 8 mins again. Right now I running it on just the cpu and it's been going for about 20 mins no problem.
I'm going to run some other diagnostic programs I have and try to figure which one of the sticks is bad. Good thing Corsair has lifetime warrenty. I'll have an update after the weekend.

geezer10 · Jan 12, 2008

Doubt its defective memory. Still think you need to flash your BIOS.

ChrisJust66 · Jan 13, 2008

Flash my bios with what? I already have the latest bios. That was the first thing I did before I even installed Windows.

ekowalc · Jan 13, 2008

I have the exact same issue, a little different setup. Here are the specs:

Asus Maximus Extreme MOBO

2 Diamond Radeon 3870 (to be used in Crossfire mode)

4 - 1gb Corsair Twin3x2048-1800c7dfin G DDR3

Intel Core 2 Extreme x9659 (base clock at 3ghz)

2 Seagate Barracude 500gb SATA drives

I have tried almost everything there is out there, installing vista ultimate several times, installed all the newest drivers, removed the ram to 1 stick and 1 gpu, still get the same results. Memory tested my ram with windows memory check, went for several hours no errors. Flashed the radeon cards with the newest bios, tried increasing there fan speeds and no still did nothing.

My symptoms are almost the exact same, could be 5 minutes, could be 12 hours, could be on boot up but the machine will definetly freeze up. I tried different mice, different keyboard, everything...

I am almost at the point of just installing xp to see if its the OS or if its hardware. The event log shows no errors, just unexpected shutdowns.

geezer10 · Jan 14, 2008

hi ekowalc!

i notice both you guys have corsair memory - ekowalc's expects 2V on boot which is 0.3V higher than normal ddr3 1.7V. What this means in practice is that corsair support is added later to the BIOS, so latest version is essential. However even the latest BIOS doesn't guarantee Corsair support. But this would usually cause a major hang and totally unbootable system. But still I would test a small stick of another brand of normal voltage memory like kingston. sorry that will cost you $120 ekowalc.

ekowalc your system draws an insane amount of current! your PSU is a critical part - please tell us what you have. also setup your temperature display on that intel x38 northbridge

do you ever freeze in the BIOS? if not - then maybe you should look into vista memory patches that are out there before you test windows xp.

if any of this helps, click the scales under my name,

cheers!
Simon

farhaded · Jan 15, 2008

Chris,

Are you experiencing the crashes only during gaming or also during other GPU sensitive tasks?
To test this theory, I ran the PCI and GPU stress tests through n tune, and sure enough the computer would hang in a few minutes, as during game play.
The memory and cpu stress tests didn't result in failures even after long testing sessions.

Farhad.

ekowalc · Jan 15, 2008

I wanted to update, Geezer thanks a ton for your help. I thought I had upped the voltage before on this ram, but never to 2V. To my surprise the upping has made the machine (fingers crossed) perform excellent for at least the last 2 hours, no hangs nothing.. I am reinstalling vista 64 currently as well.

Thanks again!

ChrisJust66 · Jan 15, 2008

It happens during games because most of time that's what I do. But I do remember when I first built it that some times the desktop would be frozen when I let it sit for a while (like a day) and I thought nothing of it because I really didn't do much on in until about a month later due to school and work. I'm still running test on it though and I think i;m getting some results but it's still to early I've been running Everest stress test's on it and I'll have to get ntune to do the gpu tests but every time I would stress the memory it would eventually hang. Some times in 20 mins and other times in 2 hours, but it would always hang. I never got it to hang even after 8 hours on just a cpu stress though. So I thought I would do the test on only 2 gb and see what would happen. Ran the test on 2 and got a hardware failure in about 2 minutes and everest stopped the test. So I ran a cpu, fsb, and cache test and it froze on that. I'm guessing due to the cache and the ram together. Then I ran a mem test again and hardware failure again. So now I'm running it on just 1 stick to find out which one, if not both, is the culprit. Sorry for this one being kinda in a ramble but I'm in a hurry and gots to go. I'll post so picks of the test failures though later so you can see.

p.s. I talked to one of my friends who owns a shop and he said that corsair got some bad chips last year from korea but mine were manufactured in '06 so I'm not sure if I got a bad bunch or not.

Later! :sarc:

ChrisJust66 · Jan 19, 2008

Ok so I can't get the pics to work. But who cares? I fixed it. But before I tell you what was wrong with it i want to see if any one can figure out what it was. I had this thought in the back of my mind the whole time, thinking it might be the problem but I thought, nah it can't be it. It was kind of my fault in that I should have known better but I've never had this problem nor ever heard of it. I'll give you the specs of a few things and a day to tell me what you think it is. Mostly because I want to make sure that it is in fact the problem. I'm 99.9% positive it is.

Here are some specs:

Asus p5n32-sli premium

Intel core 2 duo e6750

That's all you really need to know to figure it out. When I would get the hardware failure in everest the cpu would be at 0% even before it failed when it sould've been at about 50%. The thing that threw me off was the it would only do it if I have more than one ram stick installed. And like I said, i never would have thought of this to cause a problem. I did think about it when i bought the cpu but... :sarc:

Grentarc · Jan 20, 2008

I have similar problems with mine... cant figure it out.
been running XP 32 bit for ages, no problems
decide to do dual boot with Vista x64, and get random hanging.. complete lock up, not just a couple seconds or anything.
hardware :
Asus Crosshair motherboard (Nforce 590 SLI AMD) with latest bios
AMD Athlon64 x2 5600+
2x 1gb DDR2 800 PQi memory sticks
2x Geforce 7600 GT in SLI
vista boot - 200gb WD SATA
XP boot - 400gb Samsung SATA2
620w Corsair PSU - SLI certified

if anyone has some tips for this...
I have changed motherboard drivers, i have changed graphic drivers, i have changed only disk drive controller drivers, i cant find a pattern to the hanging.. i left it overnight playing music.. didnt crash. turn it on next time, and hangs within 2 seconds of logging in!
help?

ChrisJust66 · Jan 20, 2008

Grentarc said:
I have similar problems with mine... cant figure it out.
been running XP 32 bit for ages, no problems
decide to do dual boot with Vista x64, and get random hanging.. complete lock up, not just a couple seconds or anything.
hardware :
Asus Crosshair motherboard (Nforce 590 SLI AMD) with latest bios
AMD Athlon64 x2 5600+
2x 1gb DDR2 800 PQi memory sticks
2x Geforce 7600 GT in SLI
vista boot - 200gb WD SATA
XP boot - 400gb Samsung SATA2
620w Corsair PSU - SLI certified

if anyone has some tips for this...
I have changed motherboard drivers, i have changed graphic drivers, i have changed only disk drive controller drivers, i cant find a pattern to the hanging.. i left it overnight playing music.. didnt crash. turn it on next time, and hangs within 2 seconds of logging in!
help?

Have you tried to take the xp hard drive off and seeing if the computer would work ok with just the vista hard drive?

Random Freezing in games/ at desktop

My Computer

NoNonsense

My Computer

Plays with his WEI

My Computer

My Computer

47,65,65,6B

My Computer

NoNonsense

My Computer

New Member

My Computer

Engineer

My Computer

My Computer

My Computer

Engineer

My Computer

My Computer

New Member

My Computer

Engineer

My Computer

New Member

My Computer

New Member

My Computer

My Computer

My Computer

New Member

My Computer

My Computer