Random freezes

Morbius · 14 Dec 2011 at 16:14

Hi guys,

I've tried my best to diagnose this problem but I don't know what might be causing it. Recently, my computer has started freezing. No BSOD, no restarts, just a complete lock up with the mouse frozen. It's not down to heating or load on the system because the temps are fine and it sometimes happens when it's idling.

I've run memtest86+ on the memory and no errors are reported. I read somewhere that the motherboard sometimes has timing issues with memory so I got the proper timing values from the qvl and entered them in manually, but this didn't rectify the problem. I've reformatted and this has not fixed it. I've run the manufacturer diagnostic tools on the hard disk but it came back fine.

There are no relevant errors in the event viewer, short of "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly." It looks like a hardware issue of some sort, but I'm lost as to where it could be. Could my motherboard be failing?

The spec is below in case there's anything I might have missed.

CPU: Intel i7 920 2.66 GHz Nelahem
MB: Asus P6T Intel X58 DDR3
RAM: OCZ Gold 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 1600MHz Triple Channel (OCZ3G1600LV6GK)
OS: Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium
GPU: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache
PSU: Corsair TX 650W ATX SLi Compliant

Edit: Oh, by the way, I've also updated the motherboard bios to the latest version and that didn't fix it.

lrlcr · 14 Dec 2011 at 16:17

Checked the psu?

RJC · 14 Dec 2011 at 16:18

Test the hard drive for any errors.

I had the OCZ ram in my system and these coursed various issues, the first set coursed BSOD and the second set coursed instability issues but passed mem test, have a go at using one memory module and see how you get on.

Morbius · 14 Dec 2011 at 16:21

lrlcr said:
Checked the psu?

I've not tried a new one, but the voltages shown in the bios looked reasonable.

Morbius · 14 Dec 2011 at 16:25

RJC said:
Test the hard drive for any errors.

I had the OCZ ram in my system and these coursed various issues, the first set coursed BSOD and the second set coursed instability issues but passed mem test, have a go at using one memory module and see how you get on.

The hard drive passes SMART testing and it passed the basic test in the WD diagnostic program. I'm running the extended test now to see if it's OK.

So you think it's possible that the RAM could be dodgy, yet still pass memtest? I'll give that a go later.

RJC · 14 Dec 2011 at 16:29

Morbius said:
So you think it's possible that the RAM could be dodgy, yet still pass memtest? I'll give that a go later.

Yep, I had a bit of fun and games trying to work out what was happening with my system, espicially as they passed mem test.

Give it a go, one thing to tick off the fault finding guide

Morbius · 14 Dec 2011 at 16:29

Right, using SpeedFan to get the PSU voltages, we have...

Vcore: 1.00V
+12V: 11.19V
AVcc: 3.33V
Vcore: 1.00V
+3.3V : 3.31V
+5V: 5.17V
+12V: 11.91V
GPU Vddc: 1.09V

RJC · 14 Dec 2011 at 16:31

Do you have a multimeter?

I personally don't bother using software to read voltage as is always pretty much wrong, MY system shows the 12v line at something like 3v.

Morbius · 14 Dec 2011 at 16:40

RJC said:
Do you have a multimeter?

I personally don't bother using software to read voltage as is always pretty much wrong, MY system shows the 12v line at something like 3v.

I do somewhere, but I'll try that later. I'm going to try memory first, as my gut feeling is usually memory for this sort of problem. I'm currently running on one stick, so I'll see if I can break it. If it does break, then I'll swap it for another stick and see if it breaks again. If not, then I've found the problem.

Morbius · 14 Dec 2011 at 21:35

Right, I've got it running on one stick and touch wood it's been stable so far. I'm going to test it a bit more and if all goes well I'll try adding another and hopefully work out which stick has a problem.