Sudden

[006409]

Sudden instability/failure

Hey guys,

I have this slight problem with the fact that all of a sudden my set-up has become very unstable. Up until last night when I powered of my PC everything was going tick-tock perfect, nothing wrong, everything working.

Today my PC has been on about 6 hours and i've has 5 system crashes. They are completely random. 2 have been blue screens and the other 3 the thing has just died before flicking back on. Usually im able to sort things out myself but this has just struck me dead and id like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Ive not installed any new software, drivers (GPU drivers are upto date tho same as BIOS) or hardware for a while and my temps aren’t hich CPU/GPU wise according to Bios and software. So I’m not sure if it could be hardware on the brink of failure. PSU did occur to me but that’s been running fine, it’s a 3 month old 'ish' corsair AX1200 that is complete overkill for this system until I upgrade my motherboard/CPU.

Any ideas would be truly appreciated as i have alot of CAD work in the pipe line.

 

[lardan]

make sure everything is seated properly first - particularly your memory as that sounds like it's the most likely cause then run something like memtest to check it. Then maybe a windows update might have screwed something up so you could try going back to an earlier system restore if not...

Test the motherboard out of the case to make sure nothing is shorting.

When it died did the whole thing just go off? What kit have you got in there? How long has it been up and running fine?

 

[006409]

Thanks for the fast response.

I haven’t touched the inside of my rig in a while but have just opened it and taken the motherboard out. There is almost zero dust on the board as my rig is completely dust filtered and I can see nothing shorting it. Until now my system has been stable with no changes for about 6 months while I raise the cash for new MB & CPU so I can finally put my Quadro card to good use. When it dies it just resets itself or blue screens. Its not the SSD as it manages to dump the RAM onto the hard drive.

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601

Motherboard Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. P55-US3L

CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 760 @ 2.80GHz, 3360 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s

BIOS Award Software International, Inc. FH, 24/06/2010

RAM Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3

Sound card ASUS Xonar D2

GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Matrix

SSD Corsair Force GT 120GB (firmware fully updated)

HDD1 Western digital 1TB black

HDD2 Western digital 1TB green

 

[seumasbeathan]

What power supply do you have?

 

[006409]

AX1200w

overkill i know but ites ready for the upgrade

 

[Ru5ty_t00l]

overclocking?

 

[006409]

@4.2GHz

its been stable like that for the last 8 months with 0% issue

been running at stock again for about an hour and have had 2 crashes since. Its odd cus even if nothings happening the comp will crash :L

 

[Ru5ty_t00l]

then it might be your psu

do u have one spare to try?

 

[lardan]

couple of other things you could do to exclude things

try with just one stick of ram (using both if you still get a crash) - did you try memtest btw?

go back to bare bones system (no soundcard, graphics card, extra hard discs) then one by one add them back in

image your boot disc to a spare hard disc to exclude that

 

[006409]

Yeh sorry forgot to mention memtest came back clean, was kinda hoping that was it as i have spare. Swapped it out anyway and it still happens even with a bios flash to get rid of the overclock.

PSU i have also tested with a spair mush smaller one, still getting blue screens. :L

hard drive ill check tomorrow with a spare tomorrow but my comp is managing to dump the memory into it before a restart when it blue screens so i dont think its that.

Thank you everyone for your help so far