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Regular freezes while gaming

A

ashground

n00b
Joined
Apr 2, 2011
Messages
11
Starting about a month ago I've been experiencing regular freezes on my computer. I'm having a lot of trouble finding the cause. This is my setup:

PSU: Corsair TX750W
CPU: Intel i5 750 LGA1156 2.66
MB: Gigabyte P55A-UD3P
RAM: OCZ OCZ3G1333LV8GK (2x4gb + 2x2gb, 12gb total)
GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 260 Twin Frozr OC
HDD: WD 250gb, WB Caviar Black 1tb
Other: Dynex 3-Port FireWire/IEEE 1394 PCI Card
OS: Windows 7 64

The problem I'm facing: after playing some games for extended periods of time, the computer freezes. The audio skips and image completely freezes -- however, Windows is still responsive. I can hit ctrl+alt+del and pull up the Security screen. If I then hit esc, I can return to the game, which is usually waiting in a paused state. If I immediately start playing again, it freezes again in a few seconds. If I wait a few minutes before I return to the game, everything will have returned to normal.

The first thing I noticed is that the freeze tends to happen when my video card reaches around 70 degrees. At first I thought it might be a problem with the video card not handling that temperature well, so I stuck a huge-ass fan beside my open tower and played some games. My video card never passed 52, and I still encountered a freeze, so heat isn't the issue. I'm also not experiencing any artifacting, ever. I have the GPU's fan set to kick in at 55.

I ran memtest86+ through ten passes, no errors. I also ran ATI Tool, which kept my card at 80 degrees (when I'm gaming it tends to peak around 75, idles at 50-55). Again, not a single error.

Everything on my computer is completely up-to-date, including audio and video drivers, as well as OS updates and service packs. I use After Effects extensively on my computer, which puts a lot of stress on the RAM and CPU, and have never encountered a problem. Nothing is overclocked or tweaked in any way. All the components are about a year old.

I've experienced the freeze in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Risen, Crysis 2 and Portal 2. The first time I played Portal 2 I played for three hours before the freeze, while the next day it froze after half an hour. An oddity: I've never experienced a freeze playing Split/Second, regardless of how long I've been playing.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I should be looking at? I've totally run out of ideas.
 
It still sounds like a video issue. I had a 8600gt that would randomly start stuttering through counter strike. It would eventually completely freeze (looping audio) until i alt tabbed, closed counter strike, and restarted again. The card had some blown capacitors on it.

Put in an ati4850, works fine now.

You can also run some cpu tests just to make sure, but it really doesn't sound like cpu since your computer doesn't actually completely crash (Prime95 small FFT, and IntelBurn test are popular, intelburn test uses linpack, you can find a similar test in OCCT)

Also, to test video card some more, you can run either OCCT gpu test (this might ask you to update your directx9, windows vista or 7 dont come with updated dx9) or run furmark.

edit: forgot to mention, that same 8600gt would run other 3d things fine, so, it was kind of hard to determine. I believe it actually ran 20min of furmark without issue.
 
I ran the GPU OCCT test for an hour with no errors. However, I noticed that the fur pattern it was using was moving for the first couple minutes, then froze in place for the remainder of the test. Is this normal? Was it supposed to stay animated?

Here's the result:

2011-04-24-10h09-GPU1.png
 
It's normal IIRC.

Try running the OCCT GPU test for longer than an hour. Any chance that you can try a different GPU?

Also run some HDD tests just to rule that out:
[Testing the Hard Drive]
Download the CD image of Hitachi Drive Fitness Test, burn the ISO file to a CD, and then boot from it, just like you would do with the XP/Vista install CD. Test the hard drive and see if any problems are found. DFT will run on most manufacturers' hard drives. Alternatively, you can use Seagate's SeaTools for DOS to test a Seagate or Maxtor drive. For a Western Digital drive, you could use Data Lifeguard Tools for DOS to test a Western Digital drive.

And did you run Memtest on each stick individually?
 
I'm still struggling with this issue. I've ran every test I can think of, and absolutely nothing is producing any errors. I finally tried running OCCT while playing a game -- Arkham Asylum seems to freeze the quickest. When the game locks up (after about twenty minutes of play -- the sounds keep playing but the picture freezes and game stops), OCCT stops running, saying that there was a "User Abort". There's nothing at all weird on the graphs before the crash except for CPU4 jumping four degrees immediately before the freeze (from 60 to 64).

The GPU temp:

2011-05-28-09h24-GPU1.png


The weird CPU spike:

2011-05-28-09h24-CPU4.png


Like I said, nothing really strange.

Repeated runs of memtest are still producing error-free results.
 
You probably just have a bad GPU. Heat isn't to blame for all chip failures. CPU, Memory, and PSU could also be to blame. Components can pass synthetic tests yet fail under a real world gaming load.

In th end, all you can do is make a best guess on what to replace. It helps if you can find someone else that will loan you a GPU and PSU to test with.
 
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