AMD 975 failing over night?

[mojothehut]

Hey all
I have a Sabertooth 990FX pared with an AMD PhenomII 975.
For the last few weeks, I've been experiencing a weird problem.
At some point during the night, something goes wrong. I wake and sit down to a blank monitor, non-responding computer, forcing me to restart it via power button.
I do NOT use any power saving features other than AMD cool&quiet. Windows power is set to high performance for everything. No sleep mode/hybrid sleep, or hard disk turning off.
My motherboard has the latest version of bios, my drivers are fully updated. This is the only issue Im having with my computer.
Hoping that someone with a Sabertooth 990fx reads this. But if not no biggie, just curious if anyone has heard of such a problem? Kind of smacks of some idle power setting issue with the cpu
My hardware:
Corsair 700watt psu,
Sapphire 7950 OC edition
8gb Corsair 1600
Sabertooth 990FX motherboard
AMD 975
Win7 Pro64

 

[ShintaiDK]

I think its actually the GFX. I heard others that got problems. Specially with OCed GFX cards that cant come out of sleep modes.

 

[borisvodofsky]

I heard a bunch of horror stories from my friends about the sabertooth line of boards, as it turns out, while that fancy shell cools certain components, it "heats up" others.

many people actually take off the shell.

Just check and make sure it's not the motherboard before you buy new stuff.

 

[lopri]

Have you tried stress testing your system? Your system might not be stable or something may be faulty. You should run a few tests at a minimum:

- Prime95 or Linpack for CPU and (some or most) memory
- 3DMark or other GPU stressing programs, though I'd think the GPU should run at a reduced clock when unused even if it's overclocked
- Memtest (patience required)

Also, is there any specific reason why you don't use S3 sleep? (but use Cool'n Quiet?)

 

[borisvodofsky]

Have you tried stress testing your system? Your system might not be stable or something may be faulty. You should run a few tests at a minimum:

- Prime95 or Linpack for CPU and (some or most) memory
- 3DMark or other GPU stressing programs, though I'd think the GPU should run at a reduced clock when unused even if it's overclocked
- Memtest (patience required)

Also, is there any specific reason why you don't use S3 sleep? (but use Cool'n Quiet?)

memtest is silly. This is a gameputer, not space shuttle. If it passes Intel Burn test with high memory load, you're good to go.

 

[Puppies04]

memtest is silly. This is a gameputer, not space shuttle. If it passes Intel Burn test with high memory load, you're good to go.

So gaming computers don't use RAM, well you learn something every day. I will be sure not to waste my time with all those other stress testing programs from now on and just run IBT on high for 10 runs.

 

[mojothehut]

I've ran prime95 for 12 hours, my cpu never gets above 60-61.
memtest ran fine, no errors, same with 3dmark.
All my games run just peachy. I can play Skyrim, SWTOR, WoW, BF3 for hours and have no issues. My gpu never gets above 55-60c, idles around 32.

It just seems to happen after my computer idles for like 6 hours straight

 

[Eeqmcsq]

Have you tried idling overnight in safe mode? Or idling overnight on the login screen?

Another wild guess could be that your HDD is about to die? I have a secondary 320GB HDD that sometimes mysteriously "loses its connection", causing my HDD LED to stay lit up. I know it's that HDD because when I reboot, that HDD no longer shows up in the BIOS, and I must do a full power down to detect it again. So I suspect it might be dying.

I don't actually use it regularly, or even mount it, so my primary OS (in this case, Ubuntu) didn't hang or anything. But Ubuntu would likely have hung if it had been installed on that HDD. Perhaps your overnight hang is something similar.

 

[mojothehut]

Have you tried idling overnight in safe mode? Or idling overnight on the login screen?

Another wild guess could be that your HDD is about to die? I have a secondary 320GB HDD that sometimes mysteriously "loses its connection", causing my HDD LED to stay lit up. I know it's that HDD because when I reboot, that HDD no longer shows up in the BIOS, and I must do a full power down to detect it again. So I suspect it might be dying.

I don't actually use it regularly, or even mount it, so my primary OS (in this case, Ubuntu) didn't hang or anything. But Ubuntu would likely have hung if it had been installed on that HDD. Perhaps your overnight hang is something similar.

I guess I could try leaving it in safe mode over night. I'm on a new hard drive, at first I thought it was HD issue as well so I bought a brand new one, using a different sata port and everything. Even went from win7 Home to win7 pro why not.

 

[KingFatty]

Does some industrial equipment down the street kick on and send a power blip through your house at like 3:00 am every morning (dimming lights etc.)?

If you let the computer idle for all day during the day, does the same thing happen?

 

[2is]

Have you checked event viewer logs? Might be some useful info there.

 

[mojothehut]

Have you checked event viewer logs? Might be some useful info there.

The only error in the logs is the power shut down that I have to do to reboot it. =(

 

[borisvodofsky]

Does some industrial equipment down the street kick on and send a power blip through your house at like 3:00 am every morning (dimming lights etc.)?

If you let the computer idle for all day during the day, does the same thing happen?

If you have a good enough psu, this shouldn't be too big an issue.

 

[nenforcer]

If you have absolutely nothing like hibernation enabled then I would consider swapping out to an older video card temporarily like ShintaiDK suggests and see if the problem still persists.

 

[sm625]

Check power options; make sure it isnt turning the hdd of after a few hours. If that is what is happening then you could need the "hotfix for disappearing hdd" kb977178.

 

[MentalIlness]

I heard a bunch of horror stories from my friends about the sabertooth line of boards, as it turns out, while that fancy shell cools certain components, it "heats up" others.

many people actually take off the shell.

Just check and make sure it's not the motherboard before you buy new stuff.

The Sabertooth 990FX doesn't have a shell. The P67 and Z77 do I believe. But not the 990FX.