Persistent lock-ups with black screen... please help

BillTheButcher

BillTheButcher

BillTheButcher

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Joined
2 Nov 2005
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395
I've been trying various settings and posting some of the results on here but I can't seem to stabilise my new system. :(

Here's the hardware:
Asus P8Z68-V Pro
i7-2600k
2x 4GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600
120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD (system drive)
2x 250GB WD Velociraptors RAID0 (storage)
Gainward GTX 590
Corsair AX1200 PSU
Creative Labs X-Fi Fatal1ty

This is the first time I've ever tried overclocking so I started off cautiously, following the guide on clunk.org. I manually set the multiplier in the BIOS to 40 and gradually increased the voltage until it stopped BSODing.

So no more 0x124 errors but now I'm getting a different kind of lock up. It doesn't matter what I'm doing: gaming, browsing the web, sending emails... The PC will suddenly stop responding. I can still move the mouse but everything elses freezes. If I Ctrl-Alt-Del I get a black screen but nothing else. The only way to get out is to hard reset the PC.

Sometimes this happens after a few minutes, sometimes it will be fine for a few days and I'll think it's stable but then it'll crash again.

There's nothing in Minidump following these crashes.

I've tried loading the BIOS defaults, disabling Turbo mode, loading the new 0651 beta BIOS... nothing seems to make any difference and I'm at my wits' end. :(

I thought maybe it was my 590 overheating (it's been hitting 90C in some DX11 games) but the PC crashed on me a few minutes ago and the 590 is idling at about 37C so it's not that.

I know this is probably a TL;DR but I don't know what else to try and I don't want to have to give up on the new build.

Any ideas? I'm happy to post any info that might help to troubleshoot this.

Thanks a lot for reading. :)
 
Sorry. :o

I've tried lots of different settings: speeds ranging from 3.4 up to 4.4GHz. I've tried setting the voltage manually starting at 1.12 up to 1.3. It stopped BSODing at about 1.28.

I've also tried leaving all voltage settings on auto and just changing the turbo multiplier.

And I've tried loading BIOS defaults and not changing anything.

Stability testing: IBT for a couple of hours and Prime95 for about 6 hours. Passed everything. It's never crashed during a stability test.
 
I've just successfully completed 5 runs of IBT @ 4GHz with a GFlops highest reading of 103.29 which is just over 80% of the peak (32*4=128).

Values for the other 4 runs were 100.83, 101.99, 103.12 and 102.98.

Also recorded a new CPU temp record of 62C during the burns. :D
 
joeyjojo said:
Sounds stable to me :) good work.

Let us know if you get more problems.
Click to expand...
Will do. Thanks for your help. :)

muriel said:
This is a problem with your OCZ vertex 3 send it back and switch it for another Brand...

overclocking Does not just freeze the PC and the mouse is continuing to work !!
Click to expand...
At first I thought it might be to do with the SSD so I took it out of the system and plugged my old OS drives back in (WD Velociraptors in RAID0) but the crashes still happened. So the problem is not with the SSD.
 
Thanks. :)

The 590 gets up to a peak of just less than 90C on each GPU. This is quite high but below its recommended maximum of 97C. The fan is on automatic (via the nVidia control panel) and it's never been above 70%.

As I said above, I thought initially that it might be the GPU overheating but I had a black screen with both GPUs idling at 37C.

It's been on all weekend running all sorts of benchmarks and stress tests and I've done loads of gaming on it as well and *touch wood* I haven't had a black screen since Friday lunchtime.
 
I've done loads of IBT and OCCT runs over the weekend and it's passed them all without a hitch.

Just done the first FurMark run (with fans manually set at 95%):

wg1UH.jpg


Going to try the same test with fans on automatic...
 
No I haven't had a black screen (or any other kind of crash) since Friday lunchtime and my PC has been on almost constantly since then, either running stress tests or playing Dragon Age II (which, with DX11 and everything set to Very High, is a stress test in its own right).

With the MSI Afterburner fan profile that I set up last night maximum GPU temps, even after prolonged 100% loads, are now 78C.
 
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