ASUS P8P67 intermittent slowdowns/system crashes

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Aug 3, 2003
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At random occurrences, seemingly unrelated to what i'm doing on my system, I'll experience very strange slowdown or complete system lock up.

Theses are my system specs:
i5-2400 (stock)
ASUS P8P67 (BIOS 1704)
NVIDIA GTX 260 (Drive 285.62)
Crucial C300 SSD 128GB (version 0001 I believe)
2x WD Green 2 TB drives
4x4GB DDR3
Windows 7 64bit

Occasionally when I've been streaming video from a browser or playing a game, the system will become unresponsive, yet sound will continue playing at an extremely slowed down speed. Often times my system will recover from this slow down but will continue to do it more often if I do not restart. Other times my entire system will lock up, again unrelated to what I'm doing. I've had it lock up playing games, streaming movies, listening to music, or just browsing the internet. More recently it seems to be less of the slowdown and more of a complete lock up.

After a slowdown or a complete lock-up I'll check my system viewer for errors but I have yet to find anything that occurs during/right before the crash. I've researched online and found some people who seem to have had similar problems related to their SSD's, but some of the fixes they've mentioned and I've tried haven't worked. I haven't upgraded the firmware of my SSD because it didn't seem to solve any real problems for other people and I didn't want to have to wipe out all of my data.

Beyond wiping the SSD and trying out new firmware or the possibility of a bad memory stick I'm not really sure where to go at this point to try and get this problem to go away permanently.
 
If all system thermal temps are within range, I would definitely look at eliminating the SSD from the picture. Do you have a HDD you can use for a test OS install and see if the issue replicates?

Might be worth typing out a full parts list also.

-Raja
 
I would update to the latest bios for your board, 2001. I would also look into seeing if there are any firmware updates for your SSD drive. Lastly, do you have hot swap enabled for your drives in the bios?
 
System temps have seemed fine. It doesn't require me to actually be making much use of CPU or GPU power so I don't believe that it's an overheating issue.

I have hot swap disabled for my SSD. That was one of the potential fixes for the problem that other people had been having, but it didn't seem to accomplish anything.

There is new firmware for the SSD, but I would have to wipe the entire drive and there's no guarantee of fixing anything, so I'm trying to avoid that if I can find an easier solution.

I'll have to check if I have a spare drive to use. The real problem I have is that the freezing has no consistency so It's fairly difficult to replicate it effectively.
 
Hot swap should be enabled, not disabled. I have hot swap enabled for all my drives and similar issues have all but disappeared. Later firmware updates for SSD are to help these issues as well. It is too bad you will have to wipe and start again, but it is in a option.

Are you on the latest bios (2001) for the motherboard? 1704 is older and I do believe it was a beta when it was out? There has been an 1850 and a 2001 release since 1704.
 
Okay I might be mis-remembering and switched it around in my head. I did whatever other people were suggesting but I'll double check it.

Right now my plan is to update my BIOS and double check the hot swapping.
if that fails I think I'll bite the bullet and update the SSD firmware.
 
cantankerous said:
Hot swap should be enabled, not disabled. I have hot swap enabled for all my drives and similar issues have all but disappeared. Later firmware updates for SSD are to help these issues as well. It is too bad you will have to wipe and start again, but it is in a option.

Are you on the latest bios (2001) for the motherboard? 1704 is older and I do believe it was a beta when it was out? There has been an 1850 and a 2001 release since 1704.
Click to expand...

Exactly.. Hot Swap better be enabled with that drive or you will get those wierd freezes..
 
BitterAvatar said:
There is new firmware for the SSD, but I would have to wipe the entire drive and there's no guarantee of fixing anything, so I'm trying to avoid that if I can find an easier solution.
Click to expand...

Kind of a pain in the ass, but you can do a full system image (using Windows' built-in backup/restore function) and the re-install the image after flashing the new firmware. At least that eliminates re-installing everything.
 
Hi Bitter, just out of curiosity, do you have the 2TB drives in a RAID configuration? I have the PRO version of this board and had the same symptoms as you. This was a year ago and I was able to resolve the issue, however I will have to do some serious digging to remember what I did to cure it. Hopefully the flash and hot swap will be the ticket, but if it doesn't work let me know.
 
I have a couple 2TB drives, but I don't have them in RAID.

The BIOS update and hot-swap enable hasn't fixed anything, still getting the lock ups.

Going to have to update the SSD itself I guess.
 
I'm sorry to hear that. I really hope the SSD firmware is the answer after everything you have already gone through. Has it gotten any better at all so far?
 
Go to Win7 power management, make a profile and select Hard Drive sleep=Never. Let me know if that solves your problem. That is what I did and it stopped.
 
Already had it setup to never sleep the hard drive.

Probably not going to get around to actually updating the firmware until January, just too busy.

Thanks for all the responses thus far, I will update when I go through with it.
 
Somewhat bringing this thread back from the dead, as the problem still persists.

Here's a brief overview of everything I've gone through since my original posts:

1) Updated the firmware on my SSD to 0007
2) BIOS continues to be up-to-date
3) Tried all recommended tips in this thread
4) Found a stick of RAM produced errors in Memtest - currently being RMA'd
5) Underclocking my memory to 1333 (from 1600)
6) Disabled overclocking abilities within BIOS to hopefully stabilize system

All of these events have still produced the lock-ups/slow downs, My most recent attempts (as of yesterday) have been to switch my memory over to the XMP profile and disabled the S.M.A.R.T. checks on HDD's.

At this point I'm completely out of ideas. I could probably update my video drivers but I can't imagine that making much of a difference.
 
I'm surprised no one brought this up. Is it a B3 stepping of the P67 chipset? Earlier versions had a recall on them due to SATA port failures and performance degredation. It will tell you in the UEFI if it is a B3 stepping or not. After the P67 fiasco all P67 boards identified themselves as "B3" in some way.
 
Yes, it is the B3 revision. I waited to buy my board once I heard about that problem and the box clearly labels the revision.
 
I have started using xperf.exe (part of Windows Performance Analysis Tools) to try and capture any information I can about my system when the lock up happens.

What I've found is that during a lock up, my drive spikes to 100% utilization during a read command to/from (not sure which) svchost.exe.

I'm honestly not sure how exactly to use this information or what else xperf can tell me, but I figure this is a start in the right direction to solving this problem.

I am also considering purchasing some new SATA cables at the recommendation of a friend.
 
Hi

Did you ever fix this problem. I have a similar issue and similar setup.
I fixed it a while ago with a reinstall of windows 7 but recently the problem has come back and can't figure out what's causing it. Seems to be something to do with high CPU and disk access.

Thanks in advance
 
I actually did solve my problem awhile ago, though I could never have guessed it would end up this way.

I ended up RMAing my SSD twice, my mobo once and even bought a new PSU and still had problems.

My solution: disabled my wi-fi card.

I noticed that my system hangs often occurred while I was using bandwidth (often torrents), so I thought that could be the issue. I disabled my wi-fi card and plugged in my PC through CAT5 to a wireless extender and I haven't had a single hang since then. It's been great,

It was a completely unexpected problem.
 
Ok thanks, shame because I removed my wifi card the other day but still have the problem.

Think ill try doing a clean windows install on another partition and see if that fixes it. My slowdown really only occurs if I'm multitasking and one process is using very high CPU , then the mouse stutters and things run slow until I reduce the process that's using high CPU.
Very frustrating as it was working fine.
 
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