New i5 build - Freezing up

Chong Warrior

Chong Warrior

Chong Warrior

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
12,050
Location
Manchester
Finally made the jump and upgraded from my trusty E8400 to a new 4670k and built it at the weekend. Windows 7 installed and very little else at the moment.

4670k
Gigabyte Z87-D3HP
8g Corsair Vengence Pro
250gb Samsung 840
Silver Arrow Cooler

I've kept my 650w Antec Truepower supply and MSI 5850 for now and also the 2tb WD Green HDD.

Everything working fine at the weekend, managed a few benchmarks, stress tests and also played Civ V on it for a couple of hours so everything seemed stable enough.

Today it has started freezing up, 4 times this evening. I can hear a click from the PC and that's it everything is frozen and nothing will work but a hard reset. The clicking sounds very similar to the noise the graphics card makes when the PC first boots into windows (it clicks and the fan jumps to 50%) I've had this card since the 5850 first came out and it has never skipped a beat, I don't think it's that but am lost as to what it could be. Any idea's?

Everything is stock, I haven't messed with overclocking yet and all temps are very cool. All 4 cores are under 30c and same with 5850. Locks up in windows not doing anything stressfull just browsing the forums.
 
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Have you disabled the ultra-low energy power saving states? I heard that they can cause problems with incompatible power supplies.
 
Only power saving enabled is to turn the monitor off after 15 mins and turn PC off after 30 mins.

While not super high end I think this PSU is higher quality than the vast majority of home users, I would be surprised if the PSU is causing issues with a basic Windows function?

Thinking about it I'm suspecting a graphics driver issue, I've had plenty of those, AMD drivers are terrible imho.
 
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Random symptoms such as the ones you've described are usually down to either dicky ram or hard drives. I can't see it being the PSU either as the Antecs are quality units.

Have you tried an older GPU driver to see if it fixes it?
 
As I've been trawling the net for fixes to this problem I've noticed very few people come back to a thread once they have fixed it and say what they did!

I've had a nightmare and this ended up with the PC refusing to boot at all after several lockups and BSOD's. I think the boot sector on the SSD got messed up somehow. After 5 hours trying to revive it, I gave up and reinstalled windows 7 keeping a close eye on what happened when installing drivers, etc. First installation fell apart and I had to start again. This was definitely something to do with the AMD drivers and the 5850, apparently there's a common bug with this combo as there's a miniscule problem with the voltage when the card throttles, something like 0.05v too little and this causes all kinds of instability, BSOD, flickering screens, etc when the card downclocks itself to save energy. Instead of 1.00v it drops to 0.95v (or soemthing like that) This does affect quite a few 5850's after reading up, but not enough for AMD to do anything about it :rolleyes: My card has been fine, it's only in the newer drivers that cause a problem.

So I removed the card and installed everything using the 4670k onboard grfx. Everything ran very smooth, not a single problem. I've created a backup disk and image so if anything goes wrong I don't need to go through all that again. Now once everything is up and running, I have added the 5850 with latest 13.4 drivers and create a profile using afterburner to boot on startup.

So far all is good :)
 
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