Memory or motherboard

[keyston]

Hi,
I've been having problems with my PC for about a week now.
First , it would just turn itself off, no shut down, no warning, just off. Sometimes after a few hours, sometimes a few minutes.
I brought it back to the store as its still under warranty, and after running some tests with furmark, occt etc, they told me everything was fine except for a cable from the power supply was causing overheating.
I got home, started up the PC, about an hour later it turned off again. I thought it may have been my Graphics card which I use for rendering with Iray, so I switched to a cpu renderer.
Also I thought Id take a look at the windows experience index out of interest, and noticed it said I has 16gb of ram, with only 7.9gb available. Usually it says I have 12gb available.
Also any actions inside 3ds max cause the blue ring (not responding) and rendering is just too much for it to handle.
I've tried searching forums for both of these issues and so far have done the following
1 - run-msconfig-bla bla- uncheck max ram.
2 - update bios
3 - virus scan
4 - harddisk scan
5 - system restore
6 - remove all ram, insert in first dim slot one at a time, and boot.
With step 6, all the ram booted ok, each showing 4 gb available in windows experience index. So I put all 4 chips back in and rebooted, and it went back to showing 16gb installed 7.9 gb available.
I rebooted again, 2 times, after the second reboot, it was magically back to 16gb- 12gb available.
However when refreshing the WEI it always had an error. So I rebooted again, still 12gb of ram available, and the WEI was already refreshed.
So I opened 3ds max to try to render, but its still lagging bigtime.
Anybody have any idea what this could be? All my temperatures are normal.
I ran msi afterburner and its all as usual.


My specs are;
MB - MSI 990 FXA GD80
GPU - Zotac GTX 580 3GB
Ram - Corsair vengeance ddr3 16gb (4x4gb)
CPU - AMD FX8120 black edition
OS - win7 ultimate x64

PS. Probably unrelated, but for about a month now I couldn't boot if I had a usb drive connected.

 

[Bromeh]

Hi,
I've been having problems with my PC for about a week now.
First , it would just turn itself off, no shut down, no warning, just off. Sometimes after a few hours, sometimes a few minutes.
I brought it back to the store as its still under warranty, and after running some tests with furmark, occt etc, they told me everything was fine except for a cable from the power supply was causing overheating.
I got home, started up the PC, about an hour later it turned off again. I thought it may have been my Graphics card which I use for rendering with Iray, so I switched to a cpu renderer.
Also I thought Id take a look at the windows experience index out of interest, and noticed it said I has 16gb of ram, with only 7.9gb available. Usually it says I have 12gb available.
Also any actions inside 3ds max cause the blue ring (not responding) and rendering is just too much for it to handle.
I've tried searching forums for both of these issues and so far have done the following
1 - run-msconfig-bla bla- uncheck max ram.
2 - update bios
3 - virus scan
4 - harddisk scan
5 - system restore
6 - remove all ram, insert in first dim slot one at a time, and boot.
With step 6, all the ram booted ok, each showing 4 gb available in windows experience index. So I put all 4 chips back in and rebooted, and it went back to showing 16gb installed 7.9 gb available.
I rebooted again, 2 times, after the second reboot, it was magically back to 16gb- 12gb available.
However when refreshing the WEI it always had an error. So I rebooted again, still 12gb of ram available, and the WEI was already refreshed.
So I opened 3ds max to try to render, but its still lagging bigtime.
Anybody have any idea what this could be? All my temperatures are normal.
I ran msi afterburner and its all as usual.


My specs are;
MB - MSI 990 FXA GD80
GPU - Zotac GTX 580 3GB
Ram - Corsair vengeance ddr3 16gb (4x4gb)
CPU - AMD FX8120 black edition
OS - win7 ultimate x64

PS. Probably unrelated, but for about a month now I couldn't boot if I had a usb drive connected.

Most likely a motherboard malfunction. Also had a problem like this (the usb thing). When my old mouse was connected, ram wasn't recognized correctly, slow boot times ... Weird things. Take a look a that if you say it already happened to you.


- The Brownie

 

[keyston]

Since I started this thread Ive continued to try software and bios tests and changes.
I found a component of windows which tests the ram and all was ok.
I downloaded a program called overdrive from AMD to test, monitor and adjust the cpu.
All is ok also. Although I noticed that when I tried to render with mental ray the cpu was launching turbomode, which was causing instability and hanging. So I adjusted some settings in there and everything seems ok now. (Before, when rendering and max hung, if I tried to cancell rendering the computer continued to hang and I had to restart, now if I cancel rendering it behaves as expected.
I dont know what caused all the problems before, maybe microsoft updates, maybe a power surge, or driver updates. But my computer seems to be normal again.
The said computer is rendering at the moment, (Im posting this from another pc), Its taking a long time to render which is expected for the scene and resolution. But I opened taks manager and noticed my Ram is at 90%(using 10GB) and all 8 cores of the bulldozer are at 100%. Anyone have any ideas about making the cores cpu and ram communicate faster? I know my ram is not the recommended frequency for bulldozer which amd recommends 1800 mhz or something. I intend to upgrade my ram and cpu to the fx8350, and possibly the Nvidia GK110 Titan when its released, when Ive got the spare cash. But in the meantime is there something I can tweak to speed things up a little.
Thanks in advance, this stuffs all new to me and I've had to give myself a crash course this past week.

 

[keyston]

I've solved my pc issues by installing amd overdrive and resetting my cpu to default, as well as a bios update and a few adjustments.
Found all the info I needed browsing threads in here as well as amd, microsoft and msi.
Thanks to all the tech experts for your invaluable advice.