Black screen & cpu fan ramp up. Help?

[nto]

Hello to all!

So as the title of this particular thread depicts, I have a problem with my new system.

First of all, let me give you the specifications of the system since it's vital information in resolving the problem.

- MoBo: Asus P67 Sabertooth REV B3
- GPU'S: POV GTX 580 3Gb (2pcs in SLI)
- CPU: Intel core i7 2700K, stock 3.5 GHz clock
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16Gb kit 1333MHz
- PSU: Silverstone 1200W Strider
- HDD: 2pcs WE Caviar Green 2Tb, Seagate 320Gb
- SSD: Corsair Force series 60Gb drive as boot drive
- OS: Win 7 Home Premium 64bit

Next, I am going to describe the problem at hand in as much detail as I possibly can.

So Last nigh I finally finished building the system and installing all the necessary software such as the Avast! Antivirus and all of the drivers for the hardware including the latest Flash bios for the MoBo. The system had no conflicts whatsoever when I ran the Unigine Heaven benchmark on it, neither did it react in any negative way to the Prime 95 CPU stress test or the FurMark GPU burn in test. So today I figured, I would like to try out some games on my new system and proceeded to install Crysis and Crysis 2. I started playing Crysis and for the first couple of hours it ran fine with no problems or conflicts in sight. However, after about 3 to 4 hours of gameplay it crashed. The system failure could be described with something along these lines:

1. The screen went black
2. Sound started to lag (in a way that the sound that was playing at the time of the crash started to loop in about 0.5 second loop)
3. CPU fan rapidly ramped WAY up (Antec Kuhler H20 920 and Antec ChillControll software)
4. System would not react to any commands given such as the "badass trio" known as the Ctrl, Alt, Del
5. When I turn the power off and then back on again the system boots normally other than windows asking me weather or not I would like to boot in safemode.

So my question is that could this problem be due to incorrect hardware installation, software or something else? I am fairly new to this scene so any and all advice is appreciated and welcome.

If I missed something of matter, feel free to point it out and I will post the missing information here.

Thank you all in advance for your answers and the time taken to read this.

Post Scriptum: To anyone having a hard time understanding my point/reading this post, you have to excuse me for my poor English grammar since English is not my spoken language. So apologies to everyone about the grammar used here

Post Post Scriptum: I just noticed an interesting and maybe relevant action that happens during system boot up. During boot up the motherboard flashes all of the "error" led's once, so the GPU, CPU, RAM and Storage error led's all flash once during boot up. Though they all go off as soon as Windows starts and for that reason I am led to believe that its all just a part of the normal boot process, but the manual for the MoBo does not mention anything that would correspond with this particular process. So would this for example be an indication that there indeed is an issue with the hardware? Also I am convinced at the moment that the problem has something to do with graphical stress since everything else works just fine. One last thing I think that would be worth mentioning is that while in game or benchmarking, there are no graphical artifacts visible so the GPU's should be (judging from that fact) in perfectly working order.

 

[Kent_Deigo]

Hardware issues are best diagnosed by the moving/replacing parts until the problem is isolated. The biggest issue is if you can repeat the failure reliably. If not you can never be totally sure if you solved the problem or not. I would start by looking at the power connectors where they plug into PS or MB as I have had a lot of trouble there. Look for charring, wiggle them, re-insert, be sure there is a bit of stress pulling them to the side. When running in game feel for heat everywhere. Monitor CPU, GPU temperatures. If you can reproduce problem reliably, try just one video card and then another. Keep replacing parts until it is fixed.

 

[nto]

Thanks for the advice! I isolated the problem, but not on hardware however. The crash seems to only occur during gamplay of Crysis. I really don't comprehend why, but that seems to be the only title that does that... The system certainly does not crash under graphical stress since I ran Unigine Heaven DX11 Benchmark under three displays with 5760 x 1080 resolution two times in a row and the GPU's heat level only rose to about 60 Celsius degree. Would think that 60C is perfectly within reasonable temps for the GTX 580 cards? Also, Crysis 2 ran just fine with the same setup as Unigine with no problems whatsoever. Still, I have yet to try any other title/stress test/benchmark with the system and will continue to monitor the situation closely for any performance issues etc. I think however, that there is still one small thing worth mentioning. If I put the PC on stand by aka "sleep mode" and then after 15 minutes or so try to wake it up again, it sorta wakes up. Now what I mean by that is that the system starts fine, but no image is shown on the display and it wont react to anything I do excluding turning the power off and then powering it back on again. Don't get me wrong however, since the system still boots up just fine if I normally power it off and then at a later time, on again. Could this have anything to do with crashing of the system?