Hardware Crash - BSOD

Soldato
Joined
29 Nov 2002
Posts
2,672
Location
Midlands. UK
Hi lords, ladies and gentlemen..

My colleague at work is having some issues with his Gaming rig and they have baffled me.. so thought id see if any of you guys could advise.

A few weeks back his PC started to freeze. (usually during play on L4D) and seeing as no drivers had changed and no hardware had been modfied he assumed it could be heat related so clean his case out and checked the grfx card was seated properly..

It continued to crash (freezing image forcing a hardware reset) He then tried radical cooling but enabling all fans to max speed and opening the case. It still crashed (somtimes 5 mins sometimes 50mins). He then tried to underclock his grfx card to minimum clock speeds.. but still in continued.

I suggested a memory DIMM might be faulty so a Memtest should multiple errors. He purchased to new DIMMS fitted them.. but still it keeps freezing.

He has also borrowed an alterntive grfx card from his brothers PC fitted that but still it keeps freezing.

After eliminating the grfx and memory as a possible cause i suggested a total case clean out and check. All capacitors look good all memory, pci's and CPU reseated with arctic silver. He got about an hour of L4D gaming done, then tried some benchmarking but it bombed after about 2 hours.. with a BSOD and a "hardware failure" message.

Latest drivers on all devices and newest mobo firmware.. Anyone got any suggestions??

PC is:

Asus p5ne32 sli deluxe plus
Intel QX6800 (i think)
BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX OC 768MB PCIe
4gb Corsair TW2X4G 6400C4 PRO

Running on Vista 32bit Home Prem
 
has he tried blowing into the RAM slots. I had a problem a few years ago with dust on the contacts.

Failing that Id say it could be a faulty Mobo. Is the PSU up to the job?
 
PSU should be fine.. its 850watt.. not sure on the make but is good'un afaik. The whole PC has been very well de-dusted.. all slots cleaned and contacts checked.

I get him to check the even logs..
 
I have the same mobo, and to get it stable i had to increase the PCI-E frequency in the BIOS to 101.

Is he giving the RAM enough volts?
 
Unfortunetly ther eis no Stop Code.. windows is unable to write it to the fault log. AFAIK.. as for the frequencies and volts i'll get him to check i think it was setup by the manufacturer. (who i cant mention as its a high-end gaming pc builder)
 
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