Freeze

[dt_matthews]

Hi all,

I'm after a bit of advice

I have built a new system which will be for general work / leisure and playing racing games.

The build went fine and the system is generally running fine, however, on a handful of occassions over the last couple of weeks, the machine has totally locked up, and need to be forced power-cycled.

I dont really know how to try to diagnose the cause so any pointers would be much appreciated. Some info that I hope might be useful:

# CPU temp looks fine (using CPU-z it reports around 50deg on load)
# Fans arent going bonkers or anything when this occurs
# Doesnt happen only when pushing the machine (gaming), for example last time it happened I was on a setup page for Race 07, not actually driving.
# No problem devices in Device Mgr

Thanks in advance

[Phage]

Is it a BSOD ?
A black Screen ?
A buzzing lockup ?
Any error messages ?

[Dingo]

Have you had a look in event viewer.....should give you some indication as to the nature of the problem

[dt_matthews]

sorry, I meant to elaborate;

for example, last time it happened it literally just froze on the Race 07 game (not actually driving, just messing about with game options). Nothing in the Event Viewer other than a record of the system unexpectedly shutting down.

[dt_matthews]

addendum:

Its an almost vanilla win7 x64 build, at the moment the only apps on there are Steam [and via it, Race07] and a few utilities but I can only imagine this is a driver / hardware issue for it to crash in such an un-handled manner?

[Phage]

Sounds a bit like my old buzzing lockups. They were indeed due to a cross-fire driver issue.

[dek100]

What drivers are you running?
does it only happen on certain games?

[dek100]

Try running fur mark to see if you get any GPU errors or crashes.

[dt_matthews]

What drivers are you running?
does it only happen on certain games?

im on the latest nvidia driver,

i only run one game at the moment so can say if its game specific.

[dt_matthews]

FurMark 1.9.2 ok?

[dek100]

yes, that's fine. You might have to install another game and try that as well, as it may just be the game, sometimes you get a steam game that just wont run properly.

[dek100]

Usually though, this is down to the card overheating. If you download Evga precision, you can set monitoring to show gpu temp in game, to let you know your temps

[dt_matthews]

Usually though, this is down to the card overheating. If you download Evga precision, you can set monitoring to show gpu temp in game, to let you know your temps

cool, i'll try that - thanks!

[dt_matthews]

Try running fur mark to see if you get any GPU errors or crashes.

one other thing I thought was notable (weird!), every now and again when I am running Race 07 and actually driving, it ocassionly jumps out of game back to the desktop for no apparent reason (nothing on the desktop is notifiying or flashing as newly active or anything), and if I switch back to the game [alt-tab] it resumes fine, weird. Any thoughts / similar experiences???

tia

[dt_matthews]

cool, i'll try that - thanks!

the card itself has a dual fan - is it still possible / likely that if the case isnt cooled enough that the card will overheat, I assumed it would be hard for that to happen when the card itself had so much active cooling?

[dek100]

The card you have has very good cooling, the only way it would be overheating is if it was faulty. I think you definitely have to try another game though, I think that could be what it is. Download a free game from steam or a demo and try that.