Lockups and Freezes with Soundloop

[Raze1]

I recently installed a brand new 4890 and a used PSU i bought off of craigslist. I was gaming fine on it but after a month, i've been having lockups with sound loop that either sometimes recovers by itself but most of the time I'm forced to hard reboot. It has been increasing in frequency and occurrence and I can't determine which is starting to fail, the psu or the vid card.

I only play Left4Dead and the witcher enhanced, both of which I run on highest settings. My vid card, according to CCC, only gets up to 58 C degrees on auto fan control so I'm leaning more on the PSU failing.

I've ran multiple antivirus/malware scanns, defragged with JDisk, and have the latest drivers and patches for everything.

I thought it was an issue with L4D/steam/multicore rendering issues, because I first got lockups playing l4d. But after firing up the witcher for the first time in 2 weeks, it locked up as soon as I loaded a save point, so I know its a hardware problem.

I rebooted 3 times, even underclocked my vid card to 850 and set the fan to 65 and still locked up although I lasted longer.

The hard reboots sometimes cause windows to start w/out showing my cd rom drive so i have to software reboot again.

Any suggestions? I don't have a 2nd vid card to swap, although I could try using my mobo vidcard to see if anything changes (though I wont be able to play those games and stress the PSU or rig entirely).

The only other psu I have is only 380 watts so again, I could swap that back, but it won't power my 4890 so I couldn't really get definitive results.

Any ideas?

 

[Raze1]

Also, the other day I had my computer on for 6+ hours and when I got home, I started surfing the web and I was having little lock ups as well on google chrome visiting sites I always visit (news sites, forums, nothing remotely heavy or virus risky).

That made me think my ram or hdd might be going bad...or the PSU again, acting flaky.

My house temp is pretty cool at 75-78.

I don't know if this helps or not. I guess this sounds like a multi source problem, so if anyone can recommend some benchmarks to run or time demos or mem test stuff to run, I guess I can start doing some further testing.

FWIW, all my hardware was bought in january this year (except the vid/psu of course) and nothing has ever been oc'd

 

[M4573R]

My currently dead computer has been doing those hard-freezes for about a year now. It almost always happens on the finale of L4D too, lol. Now either the mobo is dead, or the proc is dead. I've tested everything else and they are fine. It sounds like you're having even more problems than the hard-locks though.

 

[Raze1]

I ran JDisk Defrag about 6 times, rescanned with 4 antivirus, uninstalled about half a dozen programs, nothing improved. I was about to reinstall windows...but then I decided to just take out the 4890 and pop it back in thinking that maybe it loosened up b/c of how heavy it is.

I booted up with onboard video and instantly everything was as fast as can be. Next, I popped the 4890 in again and booted up praying to god and sure enough, everything is fast again. I guess some power cord got loose or something cuz I reseated everything and refastened all the power/sata cables and I guess somewhere there lied my problem.

Everything is working perfectly now, and I can now sigh with relief that I wont have to RMA my stuff. Yay!

I got the idea of loose hardware from an article in businessweek that came out this month. Who would have known lol!