Computer crashes. PSU, GPU or motherboard?

tamulionis

Honorable
Jan 20, 2014
8
0
10,510
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7750 (10 months old)
Motherboard: ASRock P5B-DE (32 months old)
PSU: Whitenergy ATX-350W (32 months old)

Sometimes AMD drivers crashes “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered”, sometimes I get BSOD DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, sometimes the screen just goes black. Reinstalling windows doesn't help.
I mainly use Xubuntu and it doesn't show any of those symptoms.

So which is most likely to be failing: PSU, motherboard or GPU?


 
Yes I know, it's crap and I guess I'll have to buy the new one.
But I don't understand one thing. I ran stress tests on GPU, windows - drivers crash immediately, linux - everything is fine.
 
That error message typically means exactly what it says - there is a driver somewhere that is causing problems, usually because it is out of date and failing or causing a conflict.

Two things that are notorious for causing that problem are incorrect video card drivers and incorrect network adapter/wireless drivers. Check that both of those are up to date. Occasionally it can also be a removable device like an external hard drive. (EDIT: I missed in your previous post that it said an AMD driver is crashing. Almost certainly the video card driver needs to be reinstalled.)

The fact that the problem goes away in Linux is pretty solid evidence that it is a software problem and probably not failing hardware.

That aside, that power supply is a stick of poo, and once you figure this problem out it wouldn't be a bad idea to replace it. One of hte better deals going on right now:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182263

But if you keep checking every day for a couple weeks, eventually you are likely to find a quality unit at that price or better on some promo or other.
 
Update.
Replaced PSU with the one I mentioned above. Drivers still crashes, so video card or motherboard, what do you guys think?
Oh and also, when on linux, sometimes HDD starts to spin really fast for like a second and PC freezes.
 

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