Prime Stable yet Random Crashes

Martynt74

Martynt74

Martynt74

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Joined
20 Feb 2004
Posts
23,459
Location
Hondon de las Nieves, Spain
I built my stepson a pc about 6 months ago using the following

I3 540 (Stock Cooler)
Asus P7H55
Sapphire 5830 (ithink)
WD Caviar Blue 500gb HD
Windows 7 HP
450W Powercool PSU

It was all working fine yet about a month ago it started to crash and reset itself. I suspected overheating or a dodgy PSU. It was failing to boot into Windows so i re-installed Windows and all went fine. I then ran Prime overnight and kept an eye on temperatures and voltages. Temps hit around 68C max but i didnt consider these to be high enough to cause problems.

Voltages seemed to be fairly stable aswell and didn't wobble more than 10%.

I'm not sure if its just a software thing that he keeps installing and causing the breaks (he's 14 so probably installs loads of crap/downloads)

Anyone got any suggestions?
 
Agreed i know its cheap and could easily be the cause of the problems. I just thought that since Prime for about 48hrs doesnt cause it to crash its unlikely to be a PSU issue.

As a note i've also disabled Windows to reset on crashes so it will BSOD and hopefully give an idea of the cause. Although its not crashed since i set that on Sunday!
 
Ok well I changed the PSU to a 550w Antec PSU.

All seemed to be fine again and the. Problems started again. Currently running memtest so will see how that goes.

One thing I've noticed is that when I took the gfx card out and connected the hdmi to the onboard gfx then the colours were a bit corrupt. Blacks showing as green etc. could it be the motherboard causing the resets?
 
Well i ran memtest overnight and its currently flying through the Intel Burn test (set to maximum ram and stress level.

I've left the number of threads on Auto as wasn't too sure on that one.

Its annoying as any "Stress Tests" seem to run through fine but then during general use it just seems to crash randomly.
 
Well it spent all night running memtest. Then it took a fair few hours running the intel burn test with 4 threads using the CPU at 100% and ~90% of the memory. Think it did 100 tests of that and all was fine.

Then tried watching something on 4od and it crashed!
 
Interestingly I ran furmark and it went after a couple minutes.

Annoyingly the onboard seems bust because white is showing as a bit pink and black is green. Perhaps if the old psu was faulty it took both with it.

All drivers are up to date as I used drivereasy to check everything.
 
Unfortunately not. All I could try is the gfx card in another pc. Although that's my home server and I don't really want to mess with it!
 
Hmmm possibly. Ive taken the gfx card out and left it running on the onboard and I got an error about the display driver however it's got the latest ones.

With the 5870 left in there were problems with both the old drivers and the latest ones.
 
I think i did but it crashed rather than restarted. Is there a log kept anywhere of the details of the run?
 
I give up!

Fitted a new graphics card (6850) re-ran Furmark and it had the gfx temps around 70c which I'm sure isn't bad and the load around 99% for about an hour. Played a bit of far cry2 for aa couple hours (only game of his I could find although I know not the newest)

Though brilliant that must be it. Ran intel burn test a couple hours to. All was fine. It had had been on for about 24hrs straight with no problems.

Joe came home, installed Skyrim. Played it for a couple hours and I hadn't heard anything and thought brilliant. All must be well.

Just had a phone call and it's gone again after about an hour! He's not said what's happened yet but I know I can never recreate the problem and all I get is hassle :(
 
I was a bit lazy admittedly and didn't bother with a fresh install. I thought going ati to
Ati would be ok and that I'd only do a fresh install if I had problems so that's still an option.

I've come home and apparently he was playing with all settings on the highest. He's dropped them down a little and hasn't been having problems since so could just have been trying to do more than the system could take.

Would you think the stock settings for this could do Skyrim on highest settings at 1920x1080?
 
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