Does this make sense to anyone?

cje

cje

cje

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Joined
3 Jan 2009
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The problem: PC locks up, but has done so in different ways:

1. PC randomly freezes, whilst left on it's own mostly. Total lock up with the screensaver on. very infrequent.

2. PC randomly freezes whilst playing games. Happens more frequent.

3. Screens sometimes screens go black whilst gaming, sound stutters/freezes and total freeze.

All settings at stock. 1066 fsb, 1333mhz RAM, 1.8VDIMM, 9-9-9-25 (AUTO timings), 1.4v NB (boosted from 1.3v).

The black screen issue seems to have gone after increasing NB (but not 100% sure), but freezing remains. However, when the clock turned midnight tonight, the pc's sound stuttered and froze for about 5 seconds, then the mouse slowed down, froze then it recovered. I then played a game, played for a while, then the game locked up. The pc's clock on the second monitor still ticked for about 5 seconds, then the whole pc locked up.

What I have tested already:
-HD passes all diagnostic test via Samsung's Diagnostics tools.
-Memory passes 6-7 passes of Memtest.
-Tried various drivers for the gfx cards. 186 currently. No difference.
-Tried newer chipset drivers.
-Tried defragging HDD.
-Also tried defragging registry for the hell of it.
-Have boosted SB to 1.55v and NB to 1.4v, just incase. Still the freezing.
-Both gfx cards are new GTS 250 and are not overheating. 72oC max.


I was thinking bad OS. But it seems alright sometimes, plus I don't think it would freeze "more often" when playing games if it were a bad OS.

I was thinking degenerating memory controller on motherboard? It seems to have started off quite mildly, now I can't play games really now at all.

Any thoughts?
 
Spec as sig yes. And I am on latest BIOS.

I'm running prime blend now. It passes 20 passes intel burn.
 
Prime95 has ran for 2 hours now, no freezes.

I think that the freezes are happening when the gfx cards are utilised mainly. I might be wrong, but somehow I don't expect prime95 to show anything.


I've tried various nvidia drivers, I just don't know anymore.
 
Yeah, I was thinking that.

If Prime95 passes no errors, and then IBT and also Memtest. I will then try 1 GPU at a time. If both cards work individually, then maybe it is a motherboard problem with SLI?

Edit - problem is, it froze in BIOS a few months ago too
 
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Wonder if an application or malware or virus scanner update is running and failing to connect with some website somewhere and doing lots of retries?

Have you tried running with the network disabled to see what happens.

My gut is telling me you should be looking at what processes are running and see if any suddenly
start hogging resources - then try to find out why.
 
I think it's your ram. Even if it is passing memtest.

It can't be a bad os or malware if it froze in the bios. Well, it cant be only a bad os.

Obvious thing to try is underclocking the graphics cards, and removing one. If the psu is having a rough time of it taking either card out will fix the issue, and if the problem remains with one card but not the other then it's probably the card.

Still, I'm placing my bets on the memory.
 
Does the 790i chipset use the NF200 to manage SLI ? (i think it was called NF200)
When I was running my 750i SLI F.T.W and Q9550 @ 3.4GHz with one 9800GX2 all was happy. Added another 9800GX2 and all seemed fine in normal use - and even in CPU intensive use. But get both cards working and things started missbehaving.
Read around for a while and it twigged that I had the option to change the NF200 voltage in BIOS, and it had additional workload all of a sudden. Upped the voltage and things started behaving again.

Before just upping the voltage, make sure it is the NF200 and ive not just got it muddled in my head. Try running with the overclock and just one card. Try running without the overclock and both cards.
 
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