Subtle instability, and I can't see a sensible way to find the problem

JonJ678

JonJ678

JonJ678

Soldato
Joined
22 Dec 2008
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England
There's something wrong with my system, but it's fairly subtle. For the last few months I've just been living with it occasionally rebooting/freezing, as I haven't had time to fight with the damned thing.

i7 920, 12gb corsair dominator, gigabyte UD5. 860W PC P&C, watercooled.

It passes IBT and prime at stock, and at 3.6ghz, but occasionally crashes under general use regardless. It's borderline stable (IBT and prime95) at 4ghz, but again occasionally crashes under general use.

It's previously been stable at 4.5ghz under reasonable voltages, and cpu temperature is not limiting. Motherboard/ram temperature might be, though there are fans blowing cool air over both. It's probably not the hard drive, in that windows & linux can both crash when running from a range of drives. It's possible the installations are all corrupt.

My gut feeling is that I've damaged the imc on the cpu by pushing too much voltage through it, and unobservantly running the cpu at 90 degrees for a month or so (blockage in tubing). Diagnosing this with any degree of certainty is proving difficult however, as the instability could be in the ram or motherboard (or indeed OS) instead. I'm starting to think the best approach is to replace a component, and retest, but that's an expensive game to play and I'm currently broke. Otherwise I can RMA components, but as they haven't failed catastrophically, I don't expect them to fail basic testing.

So, any ideas? Just living with the occasional crashes, and running at under 4ghz seems the only sane way forward at the moment. I'm hoping a reader will see something I've missed. Cheers
 
I haven't seen Window's blue screen in relation to this problem, nor has linux written "kernel panic..." to a terminal.

Either 1/
the GUI stops responding to mouse and keyboard, any motion on the screen freezes. If linux, changing to a virtual terminal doesn't work. Only "fixed" by rebooting.

Or 2/
system just reboots. This is usually when idle or when booting, in the latter case it's after the bios & general post output, but before the windows desktop.

I'd like to say it freezes under load, and reboots when idle, but I'm not sure its consistent. Previously I could consistently persuade it to lock up by abruptly moving a large amount of data into ram (4gb or so, generally a result of starting a virtualbox), but I haven't noticed this happening lately.

Does that narrow it down slightly?
 
Yes, that sounds like RAM to me. Obviously, I wouldn't rule out the IMC, but I'd try the RAM first.
 
First step is to set everything back to stock and see if the problem persists, if it does it's unlikely to be the processor and more likely to be either RAM or PSU related
 
Have you tried raising your QPI/VTT. With that amount of RAM it might need a little boost. Running 12gb Ripjaws CAS 7 1600 stuff i need 1.35v to be stable with my 920 @ 4Ghz.
 
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