Computer freezing, what is malfunctioning?

[alyflex]

I appologise in advance for the quite long post, but I feel it is necessary to include everything to get a clear picture of my problem.


My computer is freezing seemingly at random, the freezing will be instantaneous, there is no warning, and nothing will respond short of holding the power button in till it turns off.
In the last 3-4 days I have had around 20 freezes.

The freezes can seemingly happen at anytime, here is a short list of places it has happened:

During a heroes 5 game - repeatly.
Idling in windows 7.
Browsing in windows 7.
Firing up a cpu tester in windows 7.
During the booting of windows 7, both while displaying the windows flag, and the blue scene afterwards.
During loading operating system message.
During the bios intro screen, (the one that says which buttons to press in order to enter bios, ect.)
During the memtest86+ test*


Now of all these freezes I believe 3 of them to be of particular interest.
1 of the freezes in windows, which to be completely honest might not have been a freeze, but just a badly timed BSOD, created a minidump which pointed to the gfx driver. (This is the only one which has done this so far.)
The freeze during the bios intro, completely eliminates software issues as far as I know.


Finally the freezes during memtest86+:
This is the only way I know to repeatly freeze the system within just a couple of minutes. (I have tried to run it 5 times, they all froze within 3-12 min.)

The freezing can be eliminated from the memtest86+ by using the fail safe mode. (I ran the fail safe mode of memtest96+ for 4 hours with no problems.)




Tests I have run on the system:

CPU:
Prime95
Hot cpu tester pro

Memory:
memtest86+
windows memory diagnostic

GPU:
furmark

Seagate HDD:
Seatool

None of the test revealed any problems. Max temp for GPU during stress was, 71 C, while CPU reached 82 C.


I suspected it was either the motherboard or the graphic card.
Hence I swapped the graphic card with an older model from my old computer, so far no freezes, not even during memtest86+.
This would suggest that the problem was with my graphic card, but it seemed strange to me that my graphic card could be the problem in a memory test, so I took it to a friends house loaded it up in his system played around a bit (nothing unusual to see), ran memtest86+ flawlessly.
So it would seem that my graphic card is also working flawlessly, and that it is somehow the cocktail of my motherboard and graphic card, which causes the crashes.

Does this conclusion seem right to you guys?, what action would you advise me to take next?




system Specification:


System
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Manufacturer Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Model P55-USB3
Total amount of system memory 4,00 GB RAM - Corsair XMS3 vers 1.1
System type 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores 4

Storage
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Total size of hard disk(s) 1395 GB
Disk partition (C 50 GB Free (140 GB Total)
Disk partition (D 3 GB Free (1255 GB Total)
Media drive (E CD/DVD
Media drive (F CD/DVD
Media drive (G CD/DVD

Graphics
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Display adapter type NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
Total available graphics memory 2301 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 512 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 1789 MB
Display adapter driver version 8.593.100.0
Primary monitor resolution 1920x1080
DirectX version DirectX 9.0 or better

Network
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Network Adapter Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
Network Adapter Realtek PCI GBE Family Controller
Network Adapter Hamachi Network Interface



The graphic card I swapped it for was a radeon x1950 pro.

[Tueur]

Sounds to me like a dieing PSU. Your X1950 will use less power than your GForce. Try putting your GForce back in and see if it Freezes. If it does, ask your friend whos PC you tested your GPU in if you can borrow his PSU to test.

Edit: Unless you need them I would also take out some of your cd/dvd drives. I cant think of a reason why you would need 3

Edit number 2: Your secon Hard disk is also almost full (it only has 3GB free). I dont think that would cause the freezes but it is not good as Defrag will not run on this drive which will affect performance. Try to keep at least 25% free.

[alyflex]

Originally Posted by Tueur

Sounds to me like a dieing PSU. Your X1950 will use less power than your GForce. Try putting your GForce back in and see if it Freezes. If it does, ask your friend whos PC you tested your GPU in if you can borrow his PSU to test.

My current PSU is a 750 Watt EPS-750W Ultra Silent, which should have no problem running them, but it could of course be defect as you say.
I just think that it is strange that the crashes will happen in situations which does not require a lot of power from my system. (running memtest cant really be that hard on the gpu/cpu).

But I got an old 450 W psu, which I could try to insert instead.

Originally Posted by Tueur

Edit: Unless you need them I would also take out some of your cd/dvd drives. I cant think of a reason why you would need 3

Edit number 2: Your secon Hard disk is also almost full (it only has 3GB free). I dont think that would cause the freezes but it is not good as Defrag will not run on this drive which will affect performance. Try to keep at least 25% free.

I actually only have 1 dvd drive, the rest are virtual.
As for the Hdd it is also only 1 drive, partioned into 2 drives.

[Tueur]

Originally Posted by alyflex

I actually only have 1 dvd drive, the rest are virtual.
As for the Hdd it is also only 1 drive, partioned into 2 drives.

Virtual DVDs are fine. As for one HD you need to look at the free space on the partition. 3GB free on a 1255GB HD is not enough. you need to free up soom space.

Back to the crashing...
It could also be either a bad RAM chip or a bad socket on your MB but given that the dump file points to GPU I would suspect PSU as number 1 suspect.

[alyflex]

Update:

Yesteday:

I let the system run another memory test while visiting a friend. On the 7'th run it detected an error in the memory.

Curious I ran another test, with a very limited memory range, with the bad memory in the middle. I made it run for 5 min, which amounted to 200 completed passes, and no further errors found.

Just to be sure I made it do the normal full memory testing all night, and in 37 passes, it found errors 5 times, all in the same place as the previous.

Today:

I tried changing the PSU, but noticed that my older PSU, while powerful enough, does not contain the correct power sticks, hence no PSU swapping was done.

I took out my stable x1950 pro, and inserted my gtx 460 again, just to play around a bit more with it.
I started another memory test just to see how fast it would freeze... and suprise no freezing was observed in the 4 hours I let it run, nor was any memory errors found.

I am quite confused by all this. The best I can think of might be a loose connection somewhere?

BTW, all parts in my computer is under warranty, but the company that sold me the rams went bankrupt, so switching those might get tricky.

[Tueur]

If you are getting errors in memtest then you should prob investigate that further. Try running it with only one stick in to try and isolate which stick is bad (asuming you have two. You wont be able to RMA the chips but RAM is dirt cheap to replace nowadays.