Hi guys! Just built a new system from schratch up and now experiencing problems with freezes under Win 7 64bit. Does anyone have an idea where to start troubleshooting? Ran memtest under Windows and reported no problems, installed the newest BIOS for my mobo, installed the newest ATI Catalyst drivers. Do you think this problem is of software or hardware nature? The freezes occure under Windows itself, sometimes the system reboots by itself, sometimes I get the BSOD... Which further test should I undertake to find the bad link? All the components that I'm using are listed in my signature. Help me out...
- Is the PC in question the one in your sig? If not, then give us the full spec. EDIT: Just re read your post and can see that it is the one in your sig.... - Have you overclocked it? If so have you tried dropping the overclock to see if the problems occur at stock speeds? - If your getting BSODs, what are they? - Have you tried running memtest with one stick at a time? (running them together can sometimes hide a problem with one of the sticks) - Does your board have an on board grpahics? If so, pull out your GPU and run with the on board for a while. (to remove it from the equation)
Disable auto-reboot on BSOD (Start > Computer > System Properties > Advance system settings. A panel will open, under the "Advance" tab, click on "Settings" (bottom most one, under the group "Startup & Recovery". Another panel will open. On that new panel, you will see a check box called "Automatically restart". Uncheck that box, and click OK. When a BSOD occurs, no that blue screen, you will see a line of text in all Caps. Please tell us the message. For example: In this BSOD: The BSOD message is: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONE_PAGE_FAULT_AREA Also, open Device Manager. Do you see any devices that what a yellow icons on their icon? In the BIOS: Select "Load optimized default", then save and quit. See if there is any improvements.
I'd be willing to bet it's still the RAM. I'd check using the Memtest86 program... http://www.memtest86.com/ I had originally purchased OCZ RAM for this rig, and ended up with one completely dead stick, and the other sticks with multiple errors themselves. After an RMA and a swap over to Crucial, zero issues after a full day of running Memtest. Oh, and I had zero crashing issues after swapping RAM.
Seconded. I used to work at aria as a build tech and the amount of OCZ DDR3 we had to send back due to memtest errors was silly. I wouldn't pay for memtest though. Get a copy of Ubuntu 10.4, create a boot disk and run the memory test feature when at the splash screen. The feature is memtest. It's a shame; OCZ used to be really reliable for DDR2 too.
He's only running 4GB of RAM, so the free version on the website I linked will work without downloading a linux distro.
Thanks guys, appreciate the help. I think I've got it sorted out. Tried first with Memtest86+ (USB bootkey) all combos, bank 1 and 2 with both sticks, then bank 1 with only one stick and then bank 1 with the second one, but strangely no errors were found. However I then ran Prime95 with just the first stick in bank 1 and after an hour the system froze again but then tried the same thing with the other stick and no freezing so far (3 hours) with Prime95 in the background. If this stays as it is it means that one stick is acting strangely so a replacement should sort the whole matter. One question though, how come the BIOS tells me that 10600 (1.333Mhz) sticks with 7-7-7-21 are inserted when the OCZ declares this Platinum edition with 14400 (1.800 Mhz) with 8-8-8@1.9V. Should I be playing with the numbers somewhere to achieve this or does promised come by itself? Btw: which RAM would you recommend, would probably go with 8GB now as a replacement With which software do you ussualy OC your rigs and GPU's? Cheers!
Limitation of the X58 and P55 chipset is unable to detect your RAM configuration, and a manual clock is needed. HOWEVER, some motherboards has X.M.P which detects the RAM configuration and set your RAM to the proper settings. So, set X.M.P to from Default to Profile 1 (see under Memory configuration)
Just out of interest, Have you run core temp while idle and while running Prime95? Just in case things are getting toasty?
