Locking up during Gameplay but boots/runs fine

[Yingas]

Hi my name is Joe

For the last 3-4 months I have been troubleshooting by myself a issue i have been having with my PC

Here is the Issue, While playing ANY game WoW,Heroes of Newerth, Even some flash games my PC will lock up and sometimes crash usually after 5-7 minutes of gameplay.It seems like while this occurs my fans (all my fans) not just video or CPU seem to increase greatly in speed. Sometimes the fault is resolved and I will go back into normal gameplay, But once the fault begins to occur it will happen every 30s or so..and then result it a BSOD.. Most of the BSOD errors I have looked into point to the hard drive not being able to read something for a temporary amount of time.

Here are my Specs
Vista Home Premium 32bit
Intel Quad Core at 2.66ghz OCed to 2.9 running at 42C under load
Striker Extreme 680i Mobo
Aprevia 680 Watt PSU
Nvidia EVGA 260GTX SC edition
Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800

Here is what I have done to try to resolve it.
New Video card 260gtx
New Harddrive Western Digitial Velioraptor And
4 New gigs of ram all MEMtested along with the harddrive being chkdsk'd multiple times
Fresh Install of Vista TWICE


Now heres the funny thing...the first 260gtx I had I thought might have been a problem because most of these lockups are card or driver related... So I got a realllly old 7600 Nvidia out (PCI) as oppossed to PCI-E with the 260X

Everything ran excellent, except for the fact that I can't run anything on anything more then lowest settings due to the power of that card.

Got my 260gtx back from RMA plugged it in and realized my top PCI-E slot had broken (the Clip that helps hold it in place was)
So I moved it to another PCI-E slot, booted and the same lock up is occuring different card,different slot


Could my PSU be causing the issues by not having enough power under load in game and shutting down the card? My CPU is barely ever over 40% usage and has always maintained a low temp So I highly doubt its that..Or could it be the mobo?

In desperate need of help -Joe

 

[festerovic]

I would think that the broken slot screws with not only the slot right next to, but the whole board. It's sure acting that way. After all, its a circuit.

Since you've put so much time into figuring out what's wrong, why don't you try a new mobo?

 

[Yingas]

well the slot right next to the broken slot is actually the PCI slot that im using the crappy nvidia card in and NOT having issues, the other PCI-E slot is actually a few slots down on the striker and near the bottom of the case (had to move my HD up to fit it into the space actually). So while I thank you for the advice I don't think the slot is messing with the whole board. Plus the slot itself doesn't seem to be damaged, just the clip that usually helps hold video cards in place.

I noticed yesterday with the 260GTX in I will even get idle system memory errors now such and In_out Kernals and Memory Management, Like I said with a brand new card from a RMA (highly doubt they just sent me a broken one) and brand new ram

 

[Yingas]

cash is getting tight to be honest, and I find it weird that if the broken slot was bugging around with the whole board that it doesn't bug out with a PCI card in a different slot

 

[festerovic]

Have you tried removing the overclock to the system? Problems still happen?

 

[Yingas]

yea tried undervolting the CPU as well at one point

 

[festerovic]

well, i'm out of ideas. I can say this, that most problems are related to RAM, overclocking, HDD, or windows. Having ruled out all these, I would also suspect the PSU. Usually you have other issues when the PSU is crapped out. I have booted many machines with f'd up PSUs, but they will always crash. I don't know how good of a PSU Aprevia is, but regardless, even Ferraris get flat tires.

 

[Yingas]

Well, I replaced the PSU with a 850 Thermaltake Black widow, And am Still getting memory management BSOD's randomly.. Ran several memtest and dskcheck's and now out of idea's