Freeze No BSOD

[Mike Roygbiv]

New build, 6 months old, experiencing hard freeze, display locks, sound loops (buzzing) no BSOD. Latter has occurred 5 times. Oddly enough never when playing games, always with firefox and chrome and vlc active at the same time. Forced to hard reset. Checked memory with memtest. Drivers are all up to date. Had a friend with more rig construction experience look over internals, everything connected properly.
Important to note. My apartment has some weird power/electricity problems. Lots of brown outs over the past 5 years. Circuit breaker blows when too many appliances are on at once, i.e air condition and microwave at the same time.
VCORE seems stable, ranges from .9 to 1.1
BIOS up to date.
Hypothesized board not getting enough voltage, in a laymens attempt at a fix I just turned on OC tuner.
Advice/suggestions? Thanks as always. Specs below.
-Windows 7 x64
-Intel Core i7 2600k/sandybridge.
-Asustek sabertooth p67
-nvidia gtx 570
-SSD - crucial c300

 

[smorizio]

make sure the asus mb has the newest bios so it has the newest ram and cpu code. make sure it set to standard mode. in performance mode the ram and cpu timing is off. under ai tunner turn on xmp pofile. use hardware info x64 turn on sensor reading...then logging and watch your 12v line voltages. also look at them in the bios. make sure there holding.

 

[techgeek]

New build, 6 months old, experiencing hard freeze, display locks, sound loops (buzzing) no BSOD. Latter has occurred 5 times. Oddly enough never when playing games, always with firefox and chrome and vlc active at the same time. Forced to hard reset. Checked memory with memtest. Drivers are all up to date. Had a friend with more rig construction experience look over internals, everything connected properly.
Important to note. My apartment has some weird power/electricity problems. Lots of brown outs over the past 5 years. Circuit breaker blows when too many appliances are on at once, i.e air condition and microwave at the same time.
VCORE seems stable, ranges from .9 to 1.1
BIOS up to date.
Hypothesized board not getting enough voltage, in a laymens attempt at a fix I just turned on OC tuner.
Advice/suggestions? Thanks as always. Specs below.
-Windows 7 x64
-Intel Core i7 2600k/sandybridge.
-Asustek sabertooth p67
-nvidia gtx 570
-SSD - crucial c300

What version of nVidia driver are you using. The latest drivers above 350.12 have problems like you are describing along with TDR's especially in Chrome, and Firefox.

If you are using a newer driver than this one, try installing it and see if the problem goes away.

There is a whole sh1t show going on over at geforce.com 's forums regarding the problems with their latest drivers.

 

[Mike Roygbiv]

Thanks for the fast feedback guys. Running memtest again, let it run all 4 passes.
bIOS is up to date but I will tinker with other options you provided.
-the GeForce driver is up to date as well. Had no idea their were problems with it till I saw your post. Will apply the hot fix nvidia provided.
-read some of the reported problems, do they really sound like mine though? Don't think it was a tdr crash. I'm experiencing total freezes where hard reset is only solution. Also with sound loop. Worth a shot anyways
- last thing, are my voltages supposed to fluctuate? Vocore goes from .9 to 1.2. Would a stable vcore be optimal? Assuming I should also turn off bios power saver mode? Thanks

 

[rdc85]

You might wanna start investing on good quality UPS for your brownout & electricity problems..
(need a good one, don't go cheap for it)...

edit: for ups don't need expensive sine wave, online, or server grade ones..
just normal off line (backup) ups is enough, just don't skip on brands..
(speaking from my own experience)

 

[Mike Roygbiv]

I can't believe it. Thought I solved hard freeze issue and now its back. Clean installed windows 8.1 about a week and a half ago. Hadn't encountered a problem until tonight. With chrome and Firefox open with vlc playing music I got another hard freeze with sound loop.
Ran memtest, no errors. Tried sfc/snannow, no issues. All drivers have been updated, bios included.
Please offer feedback on one of my theories. As I've said before my apartment has a shitty power situation. Brownouts when too many appliances on at once etc... My rig is attached to a panel that's attached to an outlet housing shared with window ac unit. I.e outlet below other outlet.
I think I recall ac kicking on when freeze occurred. I hypothesised that vcore became unstable (too low) when ac kicked on. To mediate I switched vcore to a manual constant 1.275. Prior, when on offset, vcore would fluctuate between .9-1.3
Can I be onto a solution or am I way off?
Thank you.

 

[techgeek]

Brownouts (voltage drop) is common with appliances that draw a lot of current. If you believe it's related to poor power, you forgot to mention the most important factor, PSU. Some PSU's are more susceptible to brownouts. However all PSU's will fail under severe voltage drops, especially long duration drops
.
Also if you are having circuit breakers opening and your truly experiencing brownouts, I would advise a UPS. In fact I think everyone should have one to protect their investment. They are not just to protect against power loss and brownouts, they have additional protection against power spikes and lightning strikes.

If you go for a UPS, just be aware that some older switched mode PSU's have trouble with consumer grade UPS which use a stepped sine wave (square wave) approximation. So be sure to simulate a power failure condition with your computer on and make sure that the computer remains on in the failed condition. Unfortunately I don't know of any quality consumer simulated sine wave UPS's. The simulated or true sine wave UPS's are enterprise quality and usually very expensive. That said, I have a newer switched mode PSU and it works just fine with my APC Backups 1300XS UPS. So again if you go this route, test it right away, so if it doesn't work with your PSU, you have time to return it.

 

[Mike Roygbiv]

I'll try and swap psu out with old one from other computer. This nightmare is so hard to debug without any bsod. I'm depressed over it.
I would like some specific feedback to my previous theory. That manually setting vcore to one fixed number may be more stable under my current power situation as opposed to the variable offset mode.

 

[techgeek]

The issue is likely not the created by how Vcore is being controlled. Offset essentially uses the VID table of your CPU and adds or subtracts from the present value the offset set in the BIOS. The VID table is dependent on the CPU, and its quality.

Now if you have a negative offset, it's possible that it could be a problem. When placed under load as a certain spot in the table (probably high CPU usage) that it's too little voltage. However when you have too little Vcore you usually get a WHEA (WIndows 8.X) BSOD.

One thing I thought of before, was a situation at work. I worked in Yemen where the power is 230V, but working for a Canadian company there, we had our camp wired for 120V. My desktop computer would reset / freeze when the wall air conditioner that was in the same set of plugs as my computer would kick the compressor in. It was just a little crappy HP OEM computer. When I finally got fed up, I started doing some troubleshooting. Like I said it wasn't a quality home build and I found that it had a non-automatic power switching power supply. Meaning you had a switch at the back to set it for the input AC voltage. It was set to 230V, but it was plugged into a socket for 120V. Apparently under most situations the PSU was able to work at half the voltage it was switched for, but when the compressor would kick in on the air conditioner, the input voltage would fall just enough for it to fail. I moved the switch to the 120VAC side and it never happened again. Most PSU's no longer have this switch, they will auto set for the input voltage it detects, but I thought I'd mention it just in case you have a non-automatic input voltage switching supply.

Beyond that, I'd look into a UPS. If not for troubleshooting, then to protect your computer from radically fluctuating power.

 

[Mike Roygbiv]

Thank you techgeek. I kept ac off while using rig last night. Ran furmark for about 20 minutes, no freeze. Played star trek online for about an hour, no freeze.
My psu is fairly good btw, seasonic 80+gold-750 watts.
Will try one more full day if use without ac on, if no problem will pick yours as solution. Fingers crossed.

 

[Mike Roygbiv]

Just feel like updating. So it wasn't the AC. Used rig with ac unplugged and it happened. In a noon attempt at reseating memory I accidentally put sticks in backwards and burnt the bastards out lolol.
At this point I quit, right it off as a total loss and rebuild fresh.
I'm so afraid of it ever happening again that I'm junking my sabertooth p67, phantom gtx 570, i7 2600k and seasonic 80 gold. Waste of money

 

[techgeek]

Burnt them out? You mean they smoked?

 

[Mike Roygbiv]

I didn't see smoke but the smell was overwhelming. Clearly burnt odor emanating from case and sticks. I know it sounds moronic but I lack shame lol. Reseated backwards, rig would turn on, wouldn't boot, no display on monitor but running. Left on for 5 minutes. Turned off, noticed smell and then noticed they were seated incorrectly. Total wash lol. I thank you for the help though
Btw, if I want to discuss components for new rig do I have to post a new thread or can I continue here??

 

[techgeek]

Technically you should. You'll also likely get more opinions that way. Most forum denizens hang out in the new builds section.

However if that doesn't matter, I can certainly give you my two cents.

Just for shits and giggles, do you have any spare RAM to try in the system? It's possible the motherboard survived.

 

[Mike Roygbiv]

So ya, I brought it to my friends apartment last night, has more experience building rigs than me, we swapped sticks and nothing, no boot. But you know what, I prefer ditching the board, remember, this is all due to hard freeze, sound loop lock ups. I don't trust those old components, have no idea which one was cause of freeze so, safer to start fresh.


So here's where I'm at. Core i5-4590, Samsung 850-evo 250gig ssd, diypc cuboid r microatx case....want to try and spend less than $100 for mobo, right now I'm debating asus z97 micro, but its going for $160...any input? Maybe a cheaper board?