Real head scratcher!!

Arsonist

Arsonist

Arsonist

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Evening all!

I've been having a problem with my PC for a long time now and it's beginning to get even worse and is annoying me to high hell.

I recently upgraded from a e8400 with an asus p5nd and EVGA GTX470, all with a 650W PSU. This PC was fine, however very often (probably one out of two) it would freeze while booting, or very soon after windows had loaded. I never got BSODs, error messages or anything. Just had to restart and it it seemed to be ok. It would also freeze if left for a while and had gone into some sort of power saving mode.

I have recently upgraded to an ivy 3570k, Gigabyte z77 board and 8GB ram with an SSD as boot drive, keeping the GTX470 and PSU.
However now the problem is ever worse. I will have to reboot almost 5 times in a row just to get it passed windows load. Once it's been on for 10 mins, I know its going to be stable and can play a variety of games and stress test it and it's always fine, no freezing or anything. It still, however, can freeze after a sleep or power save mode.

I am clueless as to what the heck can be wrong!

With both systems I checked everything was seated correctly, several times. Boot temps and idle temps were checked and they're all well within good limits, ie CPU at 35 and GPU at no more than 50.

No program has ever been able to find any faults in any of my components,a nd when it does eventually boot, its stable as can be. Graphics in games can be 100% high and ive got excellent FPS and temps, playability etc.

Has anybody got any ideas what I can check/look at? Really struggling here, and after my recent upgrade, i'm pretty much too poor to buy much else.

Thanks if you read this far, any comments would be very much appreciated!!!!!
 
Seems like a PSU issue. I had a failing PSU where I had to push the power button about 5 times before it finally came on, then it tended to be fine. It died eventually of course.
 
Its a powercool 650w psu 80 plus. I appreciate not the best brand, but surely if it can pump the juice out once its finally booted to play bf3 etc on full graphics no sweat, then it can't be that?
 
Arsonist said:
Its a powercool 650w psu 80 plus. I appreciate not the best brand, but surely if it can pump the juice out once its finally booted to play bf3 etc on full graphics no sweat, then it can't be that?
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None of the PCs in my house do this, and none of them use that PSU. You also said yourself your old motherboard did the same thing. Unless you have a wiring fault in your house or a dodgy power strip, it's basically going to be the PSU.

Try plugging the main box straight into the wall and power the screen off another socket.
 
I'm at a LAN at the moment and it's still doing it despite plenty of power socket availability, so not the house wiring, thankfully!

Is there no way it could be the GFX card? Sometimes when the windows logo is doing its thing on boot, there will be a quick flash of red and blue across the middle of the screen, then it freezes on a black screen.
 
Why do you want it to be the GPU so badly? You said yourself that you stress tested it. GPUs tend to fail like this:

1) No signal at all
2) Garbled screen all the time.

What you are describing is PSU failure. Also, would you rather replace a £150 GPU or a £35 PSU?
 
This is very true. My only reservation is monetary; I've been told in the past against my better judgment that a certain part was failing, to replace it, only to find out it was another part that was dead. Although I do appreciate that if I'm not going to take your advice, then whats the point in me posting here :P

So I suppose my next question would be;

Which PSU? I might go SLI in the future (if the card is still ok), and modular has always had its tempting features. Not sure what wattage I would need though.

Thank you very much for your help so far Jon :)
 
I appreciate this is reviving an old thread, but...

I hate it when I'm right. Got a brand new corsair 750W PSU, easily enough to power everything plus more. Still getting random freezes. The ONLY component left is the gpu, and I simply don't have the money to get another, as I bought the psu...
 
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