Pc keeps black screening and crashing. Needs help.

:EDITED: reworded because I kept adding chunks and repeating my self

I dont run raid, I have a 750gb and a 300gb. The latter isn't used though.

Also l4d2 just crashed running at 2.4ghz. This means that it wasn't the overclock that was causing the gaming crashs but may have been what caused the BSOD while running the prime 95 still. However it does point to it being the ram, but was running a FFT test that wasn't ment to test the ram too much.
 
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Update - Just tryed to run large FFT again with 2.4ghz clock and instantly had a black screen and had to hard restart pc.

This has only ever happened one other time while not gaming and that was a couple of days ago. Usualy only gaming triggers that. Too coincidental?
 
My advice:

1) Put everything back to stock for maximum stability (load defaults in bios)

2) Run memtest overnight 8 hrs+.

3) Run check disk.

4) Run manafacturers long smart test on hard drive.

Once all these steps have been completed succesfully you can rule out both the memory and hard drive, plus all of the above will cost you absolutely nothing ;)
 
Would a hard drive really cause my gpu to stop responding and my monitor display a loss of signal though?

Looking at the ddr2 prices on ocuk gives me cause for consern if it is the ram. I don't really want to upgrade now and spend 500 odd quid. At the same time I don't see the point in spending 70 quid on ddr2 ram.
 
Bad hard drives can cause all sorts of weird and wonderfull issues. A bad sector in the wrong place and all hell can break loose!

At the end of the day the only way you're going to find out exactly what is wrong with your computer is by doing some basic fault finding and take each component out of the equation one step at a time,

unfortunately this can be a long and laborious task! By running the tests I suggested in my previous post you'll at least be safe in the knowledge that both the hard drive and memory are good.

Once you're happy that the memory and hard drive are not causing the issues then the next step is a fresh OS install, complete with the latest drivers and updates. Doing this will obviously take the OS out of the equation.

Again it's just simple fault finding and all stuff that needs to be addressed before worrying about splashing out good money for components you may not need :)
 
Well this is interesting. It ran 11 passes but it took 11 hours. Why is this interesting? Because it ran 2 passes in 45 minutes before. Does each pass take progressively longer or was my pc starting to slow down as memtest ran? I guess orginaly my pc was overclocked when test was running but the ram its self was infact slightly underclocked. I dunno how cpu clock speed affects memtest though.

So either way the memory is clear. This brings up a few questions however:

1) There was a BSOD when running prim 95 the first time. Overclock instability or something else? The overclock was only at 3ghz, which could be done on stock voltages if you were lucky but i'd upped them. Also the second time running prim 95 with a 2.4ghz cpu i got a black screen almost instantly. Suggesting a lack of power maybe?

2) I have resinstalled my OS at least 3 times over the course of this pc's life and i've had the intermitant random black screen then back to normal symptom for most of its life over the course of two graphics cards. The symptoms came very quickly when I got the new graphics card as well. This personaly to me suggests its not a graphics card problem and does suggest mobo or psu I think now that the memory has been ruled out.

3) I also had said problem above over 2 hard drives. They were never used in tandum and had fresh installs on both hard drives.

I think this means it has to be an orginal component causing this. While the psu is the most obvious choice it is also the most reliable part in my pc I feel as seasonic do make top quality psu's and the mobo was always dodgy from the start.

I need to convince my friend to let me use his psu. Unfortunetly he's not one who likes to do anything for anyone unless it benefits him. Why I call him a friend I'm not quite sure in that regard. But either way I feel that may be the desider as it will show if its mobo or psu. But I can't be sure its the mobo without testing the hd/os/drivers I guess. At least if it works fine after using his psu I will know for sure its the psu.

I shall test the hard drivers as there is no reason not to. I don't really have time to reinstall the OS as I'm busy revising for my exams and there is alota things to install when reinstalling the pc and as I said it has been reinstalled several times already.

The drivers is an interesting point. The first thing I did to both gpu's was uprgade the drivers and freshly install them to make sure they wern't corrupt. But it never made a difference. But with this gpu in particular I uninstalled the old drivers and it refused to recognise my gpu so I couldn't install the new ones. I had to restart my pc and get windows to install what ever it wanted to and then install nvidias latest over the top of it. I don't know if that could really cause the problems given it has happened over both gpu's though. But I guess as stated before, it may just be a coinsidence and the first gpu died of natural causes.
 
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Ok then an update:

1- Hard drives have been tested and are fine
2- 10 hour memtest was fine
3- Just opened up my pc and used a friends psu and played some games etc and worked fine.

Now i'm running it normaly again on my own psu and completed 3dmark 06 without crashing and managed to go up to 100 degrees on furmark without crashing.

Conclusion? A loose connection that was fixed while I was fiddling? But how would it of become loose to begin with when I havn't been inside my pc in years.
 
My previous PSU was a Seasonic S12 600, and it was rock solid, I keep it around for emergencies. Cant see how a quad core2 and 285 GTX would push it anywhere near its limits.
 
Well the fans weren't all clean as I have better things to do with my time then polish my fans lol. But they are top quality fans so should be more than capable of cooling my case, which has 4 fans in it.

Yeah I couldn't believe that my seasonic would have let me down. But now it appears everything works fine and I want to know why it wasn't working fine before!

The only things that were moved in my case:

2x power cables to the gpu as my mates psu was used to power my gpu so they were switched out and back in again.

Power cable and sata cable to one of my hard drives (which isn't used) as they got knocked out by accident while testing but for some reason my pc wont boot unless that hard drive is pluged in. God knows why, it was my old hard drive I used to use to boot and it seems to contain something that both vista and now windows 7 need to install and even formatting and reinstalling my os hasn't fixed this issue. If its not number 1 on the boot priority the pc won't boot either.


So any ideas? I find it hard to believe that my power cables to my gpu would have managed to dislodge them self and cause these problems. I believe that because my gpu uses two power cables it can infact be powered off one but is unstable so that would kind of explain all my problems apart from how the hell the cable was dislodged in the first place? Also while fiddling about with it neither of us notice that the power cables weren't plugged in properly to begin with.
 
Timeout Detection and Recovery. Can be either

Knackered or underpowered GPU.
Knackered Memory
Knackered PSU (well more a case of PSU not strong enough)
Knackered board (but unlikely)
Unstable overclock of any component in the system.
Overheating of a particular component.

You have to fault find each particular possibility and eventually you'll crack it mate.
 
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