Hi,
I've been having a strange problem with my PC for the past 12/18 months and figured I should get round to fixing it. When I'm gaming the PC sometimes completely freezes. It stops responding and the sound starts looping. Reboot it and everything's fine again. I've only had this when gaming and have noticed it when playing both Borderlands 2 and Dungeon Defenders, the two games I play most often.
My first thought was that something was overheating, so I ran various temperature monitoring tools and nothing showed up (though I haven't found a reliable way to reproduce the fault so it's hard to test).
Over time the problem got more frequent and as my temperature investigations were going nowhere I tried replacing the graphics card (it was getting old as well). I swapped it out for a super underpowered AMD thing that could barely run games and never had any problems (though also didn't do much gaming and the most taxing game I could play was Dungeon Defenders on pretty awful graphics).
A short while later I upgraded my graphics card to an AMD 6850 and lo and behold the problem returned, though nowhere near as bad as before (though my usage pattern has also changed - I was on holiday when it was really bad and playing a lot of games, now I'm gainfully employed and only play in the evenings a few nights a week).
Someone suggested it might be the PSU being incapable of supplying enough power to the system, so I took a look on http://www.extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine but that implies I have enough power. (I can't actually remember what my PSU is but it's better than 500W I think. I'll check when I get home tonight. It's a Corsair TX 650W) I'm aware it's quite old (probably getting on for 4-5 years), how much would that reduce the output by?
Does anyone else have any idea what might be wrong or what I should try to do to fix this?
PSUEngine output:
I've been having a strange problem with my PC for the past 12/18 months and figured I should get round to fixing it. When I'm gaming the PC sometimes completely freezes. It stops responding and the sound starts looping. Reboot it and everything's fine again. I've only had this when gaming and have noticed it when playing both Borderlands 2 and Dungeon Defenders, the two games I play most often.
My first thought was that something was overheating, so I ran various temperature monitoring tools and nothing showed up (though I haven't found a reliable way to reproduce the fault so it's hard to test).
Over time the problem got more frequent and as my temperature investigations were going nowhere I tried replacing the graphics card (it was getting old as well). I swapped it out for a super underpowered AMD thing that could barely run games and never had any problems (though also didn't do much gaming and the most taxing game I could play was Dungeon Defenders on pretty awful graphics).
A short while later I upgraded my graphics card to an AMD 6850 and lo and behold the problem returned, though nowhere near as bad as before (though my usage pattern has also changed - I was on holiday when it was really bad and playing a lot of games, now I'm gainfully employed and only play in the evenings a few nights a week).
Someone suggested it might be the PSU being incapable of supplying enough power to the system, so I took a look on http://www.extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine but that implies I have enough power. (
Does anyone else have any idea what might be wrong or what I should try to do to fix this?
PSUEngine output:
Code:
System Type: 1 physical CPU
Motherboard: Regular - Desktop
CPU Socket: Socket LGA 1155
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K 3300 MHz Sandy Bridge
CPU Utilization (TDP): 90% TDP
RAM: 4 Sticks DDR3 SDRAM
Video Card 1: AMD Radeon HD 6850
ATTENTION: FOR PERSONAL, NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY
Regular SATA: 2 HDDs
DRAM SSD: 1 Drive
DVD-RW/DVD+RW Drive: 1 Drive
USB: 4 Devices
Front Bay Card Reader: Yes
Fans
Regular: 2 Fans 120mm; 1 Fan 250mm;
Keyboard and mouse: Yes
System Load: 90 %
Capacitor Aging (+ W %): 30 %
Minimum PSU Wattage: 395 Watts
Recommended Wattage: 445 Watts
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