Hi all,
I just joined today, having browsed these forums in the past with good results!
Anyway, here's the scoop. I just built a new system, specs are below. Everything went perfectly smooth through the OS install. Then, I went ahead and OC'd the processor up to about 3.4GHz - any more than that, and it went unstable. I could maybe have upped the voltages, but I just decided to do the simplest overclock I could. Anyway, the machine passed all memory tests (memtest+) and CPU burn-in tests (2 instances of Orthos) I threw at it.
Then, I move on to "real world testing". I load on a few games, namely Crysis and CoD4. The thing runs like a champ. Very smooth, great performance, and absolutely NO INSTABILITY. It doesn't matter if I play Crysis for 8 hours straight, there are no issues.
Then I watched a DVD movie. Everything still fine. But then the next day I watched another DVD... the darn thing froze on me (as in a hard freeze) halfway through. I thought, "Well that's weird." So, I reset the computer, and checked the event log, and couldn't find anything. Then, I started the movie up again, and it played through fine. Since then, I've had like 4 more movies crash on me.
What's more, if I watch videos on the internet, be it Youtube.com, Break.com, etc., and put the video into fullscreen mode, the very same thing happens, only much more frequent. Like, any given streaming video I watch, there's a good chance the computer will hard freeze within about 5 or 10 minutes, many times much sooner. Only I have only noticed this in fullscreen. I have yet to notice any issue with a windowed video.
So, I says to myself, I guess the damn thing's just not stable (although the idea that I can stress it so hard without a hiccup, only to have youtube kill it really perplexes me). Anyway - next step: remove the overclock. So I go into the BIOS and restore all default settings (which even resets my DDR2-1066 memory to an 800MHz clock). I test it again, but it still locks up on me.
Maybe it's a cooling problem? I open the case all the way, and put a big ol' fan in front of it at full blast. Still locks up. Maybe the power supply can't handle dual video cards? I remove one. Still locks up. I really have NO IDEA what the hell is going on here. Logic tells me that it can't be a hardware issue. Are there any known video playback issues in Vista64 SP1? I've tried googling it, but most of the little I can find also includes issues while playing games and using a defrag utility.
Anyway, I've stayed up as late as I am willing to figure this out. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
-Douglas
Vista Business x64 SP1
XFX nForce 780i
Intel Q9300 2.5GHz
8GB Mushkin DDR2-1066
2 MSI GeForce 8800GTS 512
SeaSonic 700W 80PLUS
Seagate 250GB SATA II
LG Blu-ray/HD-DVD Drive
I just joined today, having browsed these forums in the past with good results!
Anyway, here's the scoop. I just built a new system, specs are below. Everything went perfectly smooth through the OS install. Then, I went ahead and OC'd the processor up to about 3.4GHz - any more than that, and it went unstable. I could maybe have upped the voltages, but I just decided to do the simplest overclock I could. Anyway, the machine passed all memory tests (memtest+) and CPU burn-in tests (2 instances of Orthos) I threw at it.
Then, I move on to "real world testing". I load on a few games, namely Crysis and CoD4. The thing runs like a champ. Very smooth, great performance, and absolutely NO INSTABILITY. It doesn't matter if I play Crysis for 8 hours straight, there are no issues.
Then I watched a DVD movie. Everything still fine. But then the next day I watched another DVD... the darn thing froze on me (as in a hard freeze) halfway through. I thought, "Well that's weird." So, I reset the computer, and checked the event log, and couldn't find anything. Then, I started the movie up again, and it played through fine. Since then, I've had like 4 more movies crash on me.
What's more, if I watch videos on the internet, be it Youtube.com, Break.com, etc., and put the video into fullscreen mode, the very same thing happens, only much more frequent. Like, any given streaming video I watch, there's a good chance the computer will hard freeze within about 5 or 10 minutes, many times much sooner. Only I have only noticed this in fullscreen. I have yet to notice any issue with a windowed video.
So, I says to myself, I guess the damn thing's just not stable (although the idea that I can stress it so hard without a hiccup, only to have youtube kill it really perplexes me). Anyway - next step: remove the overclock. So I go into the BIOS and restore all default settings (which even resets my DDR2-1066 memory to an 800MHz clock). I test it again, but it still locks up on me.
Maybe it's a cooling problem? I open the case all the way, and put a big ol' fan in front of it at full blast. Still locks up. Maybe the power supply can't handle dual video cards? I remove one. Still locks up. I really have NO IDEA what the hell is going on here. Logic tells me that it can't be a hardware issue. Are there any known video playback issues in Vista64 SP1? I've tried googling it, but most of the little I can find also includes issues while playing games and using a defrag utility.
Anyway, I've stayed up as late as I am willing to figure this out. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
-Douglas
Vista Business x64 SP1
XFX nForce 780i
Intel Q9300 2.5GHz
8GB Mushkin DDR2-1066
2 MSI GeForce 8800GTS 512
SeaSonic 700W 80PLUS
Seagate 250GB SATA II
LG Blu-ray/HD-DVD Drive
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