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Getting a little fed up with my system...

P

pieguy

Member
I have a system I built in February 2012 and it's always had a few glitches that have really bugged me, but I really don't know how to go about fixing or diagnosing. I'm looking for as much help or ideas as I can get. I'll try not to make this too long, but please bear with me.

The system:
Win 7 64bit Home Premium
Intel i5 2500k
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Seasonic X750 Gold
ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1600
Corsair SSD, Force Series 3 120GB
Western Digital 300GB HDD
Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC 3GB
Corsair Carbide 500R

It hasn't been overclocked at all for a while, since I thought O/C's might be causing my problems.

The problems are a lot of little stuff. I use Chrome and constantly have to minimize/maximize or flip tabs to get webpages to draw, or they appear to lock up. It seems to happen mostly when there is some kind of flash element in the page, like a video or ad. The system used to lock up completely when my monitor went into power save mode, requiring a hard reset. It doesn't do that anymore, but sometimes when the monitor is supposed to go into standby, it goes black but doesn't turn off and the mouse cursor is the only thing still on the screen. I thought this stuff sounded like a video card issue, but I have RMA'd it twice, so I'm on my 3rd card. I'm using the most current official driver release.

I had the video go out a couple of times, the motherboard LEDs indicated a problem with the video card, but it would still work some of the time. That was one of the cards I RMA'd.

I've had the system reboot randomly a couple of times, the last time a few days ago and this last one was the only time windows gave me any kind of error dialog on the reboot. I should have recorded it, but all I remember is it mentioned a BSOD.

Anyways, I'm getting tired of all this little instability stuff. Especially because nothing is overclocked and I'm not really doing anything intense with this computer anymore. These problems usually happen when I'm doing pretty basic stuff, like web browsing or whatever. I've got the latest chipset, nic, audio and video drivers, and the latest 3603 BIOS.

Please, any help?
 
It wouldn't be a bad idea under the System Properties Advanced tab to set the computer to save kernel dumps. You can disable the automatic restart on that same dialog so you can see any actual BSOD stop codes. You can also install the free version of Whocrashed to evaluate the dump files (if you had a BSOD, there should still be some sort of dump file available as it stays until it is overwritten by a new one):

http://www.resplendence.com/download/whocrashedSetup.exe

Are you getting any errors in the Windows system or application logs? Also, how do your CPU and GPU temps look? If you don't have any monitoring software installed, you can install either Speedfan or CPUID Hardware Monitor to check the temps.
 
Last edited:
The easy stuff to check for is low voltage on ram or cpu and corrupt windows install. Problems with flash but not in other areas usually means you just need to re-install your os.

Try using your integrated graphics and if the same thing happens then obviously its not your video card. Rule out a bad SSD by installing windows on a different drive.
 
1)Are you running the latest firmware for your ssd drive?
2) Can you try the graphics card in another slot?
3) what power supply are you using?
4) try running memtest against your memory to rule out issues there..
5) doublecheck your bios settings to ensure the memory voltage and timings are correct.. *you may want to try resetting bios to run optimized defaults.. just to see if that helps)
6) if none of the above helps, you may want to run a repair of Windows...

you may need to
 
Steltek said:
It wouldn't be a bad idea under the System Properties Advanced tab to set the computer to save kernel dumps. You can disable the automatic restart on that same dialog so you can see any actual BSOD stop codes. You can also install the free version of Whocrashed to evaluate the dump files (if you had a BSOD, there should still be some sort of dump file available as it stays until it is overwritten by a new one):

http://www.resplendence.com/download/whocrashedSetup.exe

Are you getting any errors in the Windows system or application logs? Also, how do your CPU and GPU temps look? If you don't have any monitoring software installed, you can install either Speedfan or CPUID Hardware Monitor to check the temps.
Click to expand...
I Agree with Steltek.Got to know the BSOD.
 
Ok, this is all so much goodness. It's going to take me a while to try these suggestions out, but I'm getting started. First things first, I updated the firmware on my SSD and took out my video card, so I'm using the integrated graphics. It was smooth sailing for a few days, until today I started getting some glitchy behavior in Chrome and it took an unusually long time for the monitor to come back on from being in standby.

The BSOD from a few days ago was (sorry for crappy formatting):
122812-6193-01.dmp 12/28/2012 6:20:18 PM SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION 0x0000003b 00000000`c000001d fffff800`034c69c5 fffff880`03de4c80 00000000`00000000 ntoskrnl.exe ntoskrnl.exe+7efc0 NT Kernel & System Microsoft® Windows® Operating System Microsoft Corporation 6.1.7601.17944 (win7sp1_gdr.120830-0333) x64 ntoskrnl.exe+7efc0 C:\Windows\Minidump\122812-6193-01.dmp 4 15 7601 288,076
 
Some suggestions to try if others don't work:

1. Memtest86+ for 24 hours or more
2. Try a Linux live disk
3. Install Windows to a non-SSD drive
4. If all else fails, remove components from case, assemble on a piece of cardboard and test.
 
pieguy said:
Ok, this is all so much goodness. It's going to take me a while to try these suggestions out, but I'm getting started. First things first, I updated the firmware on my SSD and took out my video card, so I'm using the integrated graphics. It was smooth sailing for a few days, until today I started getting some glitchy behavior in Chrome and it took an unusually long time for the monitor to come back on from being in standby.

The BSOD from a few days ago was (sorry for crappy formatting):
122812-6193-01.dmp 12/28/2012 6:20:18 PM SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION 0x0000003b 00000000`c000001d fffff800`034c69c5 fffff880`03de4c80 00000000`00000000 ntoskrnl.exe ntoskrnl.exe+7efc0 NT Kernel & System Microsoft® Windows® Operating System Microsoft Corporation 6.1.7601.17944 (win7sp1_gdr.120830-0333) x64 ntoskrnl.exe+7efc0 C:\Windows\Minidump\122812-6193-01.dmp 4 15 7601 288,076
Click to expand...

If you're on your 3rd video card, I'd say it isn't likely that the card is bad unless they are just sending your defective card straight back to you. This is especially true given you are also having problems with integrated graphics. Did you reset the CMOS memory after your most recent BIOS update?

That particular BSOD has also been known to be triggered by defective memory in addition to bad video drivers.

Were it my system, I'd burn a MEMTEST86+ CD, then pull and test the memory modules one at a time through several passes to see if you get any errors. Looking at the DRAM voltages has already been suggested, so I won't mention anything else about that.

How do the system temps (both CPU and GPU) look now that you are not overclocking -- is there anything out of line there?

One other thing you could do to eliminate Windows as the problem is to boot a Linux live CD and use it to browse the net. If you don't have any problems, a clean Windows reinstallation might be in order. If you have problems in Linux, you might want to consider that you have a defective motherboard (especially given the integrated graphics problems and the fact that this has been ongoing for so long).

EDIT: I guess ch33zw1z covered most of this already as I forgot to post the reply timely.
 
Thank you all for giving me lots of ideas to check out. My system has been running flawlessly for a couple of weeks now.

I'm not positive what exactly fixed the problem, but I'll mention what I did for future reference.

I noticed that my DRAM timings were not set properly, this probably happened after I updated the BIOS which reset the CMOS. I set the proper timings manually and ran memtest86+ for 25 hours without an error.

After updating my SSD firmware, I ran a repair on Windows. It didn't help, so I went ahead with a clean install. I tried installing all the newest drivers by downloading them, but something didn't go right so I was still having problems. I reinstalled Windows again and this time installed all the drivers off the ASUS disk.

The system was perfect at this point for a few days, so I reinstalled the video card and newest official drivers and haven't had a single problem.
 
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