Computer freezing, no idea why.

[Bobathan]

I am having a problem with my computer. When playing games, anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour plus into it, they'll freeze and the speakers will emit a high-pitched squealing. Also, when watching Hulu videos, it'll freeze and there'll be a short sound loop. I watch a lot of Youtube videos, they have never crashed the PC like Hulu ones do.

The only solution to these is a hard reset, keyboard/mouse are unresponsive.

What I have:

Asus Striker II Formula, Q9550 (Not OC'd)
4GB (4 x 1GB) OCZ PC2-8500 DDR2
2 x BFG 8800 GTX in SLI
Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1
BFG 800W Power supply

I had issues with crashes while playing games in Vista Ult. 64bit, and have just upgraded to Windows 7 Ult. 64bit. Upgraded the MB BIOS to the latest version, installed all the latest drivers, ran 12 hours of memtest+, no errors, ran 10 hours of Prime95, no errors, all 4 cores remain under 55c. Running Furmark gets both GPUs to about 80c.

One of the tricks I used while I had Vista to play games without crashing was to set games to only use 2/4 cores of my CPU. I have no idea WHY that worked, I read it on some forum somewhere while troubleshooting a game crash once. But since it ran Prime95 without errors for so long, I wouldn't think that's causing these.

I'm so frustrated at this expensive machine going to waste. Finally fed up enough to seek out help.

Thanks.

--Travis

 

[TheResidentEvil]

Sounds like RAM to me. Have you tried to remove a stick at a time and see if it fixes.

 

[Bobathan]

No, I haven't. I figured the 12 hours of Memtest meant that the RAM was ok. Do I move the RAM around when I remove one, or just go down the line?