Computer freezing! And not in the sub-zero cool way

[fruityness]

These last few weeks my vista 64 based PC has been locking up mid game, with repeating sound, like a few milliseconds of sound will repeat over and over. There is no way to get back to desktop, and a hard reset only works.

I've been digging around googling my googles off trying to find a solution. Windoze is 100% up to date, I'm using the latest drivers. To narrow down things I installed windows XP, updated it, and boom headshot, same lockups in game. This leads me to believe it is not driver or o/s related, but hardware.

OK, so hardware then. I had 2x 4850 in crossfire, So I removed one of these. Same problem, try the other vga card, same problem. OK then, the odd sound means it a soundcard issue, so I whip out the x-fi and run the onboard audio - same lock ups. ok not the soundcard then...

Must be the memory! Memtest86 is telling me the memory is fine, not the memory. OK, so therefore its the hard drives, I had 3x seagate barracudas in a raid0, so its the raid controller or the drives right? So I ditched the seagates and went back to the WD raptors, and I ran hdTune on both of these, which came back as fine, yet still getting these BLEEP BLEEP lock ups (running the wd is a non-raid environment for now).

OK, so heat issue? No cant be a heat issue. I took the block off the cpu and cleaned it, reseated it, As I also reseated the memory and vga card too (not gone crossfire yet). After a lock up whilst gaming i went straight to BIOS, and the cpu temps were shown as 1 degree below system temp, no temp is not an issue. Nor is over clocking, all standard, except a teeny trickle of extra +volt to the cpu.

So what does that leave? Motherboard or PSU right?

Man I'm ****ed, all this has lead me to think to just ditch the core2, and go for i7. The reasoning behind this is the price of a x48 mobo vs. x58 well they are on a par - I have gigabyte x48t-dq6 mobo atm.

Sacn have a DFI for £223 DFI DK X58-T3eH6, whish is the middle mobo of the 3 I believe, the one reviewed here other week was the ultra. ebuyer want £234 for my current mobo.

I'm ****ed with this. I cant really send the mobo back, as it run fine most of the time, even under load with BOINC on it, or 3dmark. Just games screw it. I dont get it, I just dont get this.

Oh I forgot I found a bug report on MS website, KB953186, tried that too, no joy. This they included that in the last SP anyway.

Anyone have any ideas, or am I just truely going to have to lump it and go i7.

[FarFarAway]

Tried checking the power settings for the hard drives and ensuring they are not set to turn off after a certain time?

[fruityness]

Thaks for the pointer Kempez, have changed the power options, its on high performance now.

Computer will never goto sleep, awww. And changed the disk drive shutdown from20min to never. Though these lock ups happen at random times, sometimes minutes into games, sometimes hours.

Will let you know how things go

19,985 posts, go go you :P

[fruityness]

Kempez!

You know, this oh-so-simple change may of fixed things for me

After going nuts trying to figure where the issue lied, a simple few clicks and it looks like things have been fixed.

Early days for now, we'll see but so far so good

Thanks!

[Diablo]

Hope that's fixed it. Mine did that recently...turned out to be a hard disk that just stopped responding...unfortunately, it was failing and has now been RMAed. Just thought I'd mention it because the symptoms are identical, although mine also fell over playing itunes etc...

[FarFarAway]

I had the same when I first had Vista and that fixed it

[Diablo]

You've got to "love" vista's power saving ideas...no really, I have a 1500W PSU and a 100Mb internet and free electricity (student digs) so go ahead and drink up the electrical juice....

[fruityness]

I thought I would post again explaining what I believe was at the root of the problem in case someone should come across this thread at some point.

It was due to the memory not receiving enough +volt. After I increased the volts to the dimms, the computer became totally stable, and I havent had a lock up in a long time now. So if you get this odd lock up, try upping the volts a tad in the bios.