Brand new Intel i7 920 build - crashing

[tkking]

Hey guys, so i got my (first) system up and running (or so i thought). Everything seemed well and fine, installed Windows 7 RC1 32bit (didn't have a copy of 64bit and forgot to order vista) without any hitches.

it was running fine and well until i tried to play Team Fortress 2 and the system froze and crashed upon launch. after that initial crash i am getting a crash around 15-20 minutes after running the system.

this is my first system build so i am not really sure what tests to be running to check hardware and such.

any help is greatly appreciated.

my build
cpu - Intel i7 920 2.67ghz

nobo - ASRock X58 Extreme LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard

ram - CORSAIR XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

psu - CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power

hdd -Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drives

cpu cooler - Scythe MUGEN-2 SCMG-2000 120mm Sleeve CPU Cooler

graphics - XFX HD-587A-ZNF9 Radeon HD 5870 (Cypress XT) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card

 

[Maziar]

Hello and welcome to the forums
Have u updated your VGA drivers ? also does it only happen in TF2?

 

[tkking]

no that was just the first. the next time was when i alt+tabbed out of half-life 2 after playing for around 30 minutes. next it happened when a banner add came folding down in google chrome about 15 minutes after boot up.

VGA drivers i assume is the graphics card drivers and yes i have gone to their website and have the latest drivers (sep 21st update, i believe)

 

[Maziar]

I just did a search and there are users reporting crashes when playing TF2 and Windows 7 RC
http://www.maximumpc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=97469&sid=8675db781202eff2c0fe323fe435bc3e
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=31d7a275937d82c26cdd402ccfac317a&t=977029&page=4

It seems that upgrading to RTM has helped,also download the game patches and see if they help or not.

Btw,yes by VGA drivers i meant Graphic card drivers

 

[tkking]

im ordering the vista 64 bit and see how things sit when that gets installed.

also im gonna run a test on the ram i got to make sure that is sitting right, was gonna try memtest86+ @ http://www.majorgeeks.com/Memtest86_d4226.html

is there other hardware tests i can run to make sure no hardware is faulty?

 

[tkking]

So according to the above posted memory test my ram is just fine.

upgraded/downgraded to vista 64 bit. problem still persists. after 20-45 minutes system will lock up with audio on loop and usb power shut down. have to manually shutdown.

so i've been reading and would the best thing to check now be the power supply? if so can someone point me in the direction of a good tutorial or some basic guidelines?

thanks a bunch for the help so far.

 

[dndhatcher]

Did you get the GPU drivers from ATI or XFX? I had similar problems a year ago with my EVGA GPU when I got the drivers from Nvidia, but replacing them with the same build from EVGA made my system stable again.

 

[tkking]

enabling a second performance set of settings in my bios appears the have fixed the issue.

still experimenting changing setting but it may be me setting the speed on the ram. I had it previously set to the ddr 1600. will have to investigate further.