Need help identifying problem

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MitchHeck

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Jul 13, 2013
17
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10,520
ASRock Z77 Pro4
i5-2500k
8gb ddr3 G Skill 1333
EGVA Geforce GTX 560 Superclocked
64gb Crucial m4 SSD
2tb ecogreen Samsung
OCZ Fatal1ty 550w power supply

After having these parts for ~1 year, there was a storm and my power went out and came on twice in quick succession. I was able to hit the switch in the back of the power supply after my computer turned off a second time. After my power came on, I used my computer and after a few hours, it started freezing. It would happen for a few seconds to a few minutes. If I restarted my computer it would freeze anywhere from a couple minutes to a few hours after doing so.

I monitor my temperatures relatively frequently (a couple times a day) with HWMonitor. My video card has never went above 80 degrees celcius and my cpu has never gone over 40 degrees celcius. When this problem started happening, I tried two other heat monitors which gave the same readings as HWMonitor. After looking for solutions, I reset my bios on my motherboard and reformatted both hard drives and reinstalled windows 7. Still no fix. I then used check disk through windows along with the memtest through windows as well (several passes), but they didn't come up with anything. I used two other hard drive monitors, but they didn't find anything either.

After searching longer, many of the posts said basically freezing can be anything. I figured I might as well RMA my video card (checked volts for power supply and got the go ahead) and buy a new power supply. I didn't touch my computer until my new power supply came in. I installed the Corsair CX500 I bought and while it sucked to use the onboard graphics, at least it worked. My computer didn't freeze at all until I installed my GTX 560 when I received it two weeks later. After only a day, the problem presented itself again.

To go into more details on the freezing, I had google chrome up watching a video, firefox was downloading a file, but idle other than that. Nothing else besides system processes and Razor Synapse was being used. The computer froze for 5 seconds then the mouse turned into double sided arrows (the arrows when adjusting the size of a screen) while I was on a blank section of the screen. When the mouse allowed itself to change into a different shape (after a minute or so), I moved the mouse to a search bar to try and find a solution. When the mouse changed to the capital "I" shape, I noticed it was yellow and only half of it was showing up. The reason I RMA'd the video card was because I thought this was an artifact, which I read was a problem with a video card or power supply. After the first freeze, freezing started happening frequently after. I shut down the computer after several frustrating minutes of navigation.

I don't know much about hard ware problems and only built my first PC less than 3 years ago. That being said, I thought it might be a motherboard problem, but I have no idea since nothing I've found has had a similar case. Any help would be appreciated and thank you for your time.
 
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As you are using two separate web browsers, and both auto-update very frequently, along with Flash, the power outage could be coincidental.

I would try your web browsing without hardware acceleration enabled.

Instructions for disabling hardware acceleration under Firefox:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forum-response-disable-hardware-acceleration

Internet Explorer also has hardware acceleration which can be disabled:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2528233

I don't use Chrome, so can't help much with it, but I found this for Chrome:

http://www.jkwebtalks.com/2011/03/enable-or-disable-hardware-acceleration.html
 
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Yes, the computer was running when the storm hit. It turned off and on twice quickly before I was able to flip the switch on the power supply and unplug it. I haven't updated the BIOS at all. It was one of the things I planned to do, but forgot about it after thinking the mouse cursor problem was my video card.
 
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I disabled hardware acceleration on Firefox, Chrome seems to have it off by default, but checked that and it was disabled. Funny enough, I usually always have a browser open, so I can't say if the problem happened while they were closed.
 
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Short of doing a bios update.
Your just going to have to test each part connected to the motherboard and see if it works fine on another board.
Then you can assume the board is damaged inside your case due to a power spike, by lightning hitting the overhead power lines of the electric grid.

Once you find the faulty Item and replace it, buy a surge protector to put in between the wall socket and your pc.

It happened twice to me, the third time the surge protector saved the pc.
I do hope nothing else is broken due to the storm, but take my advice if you don`t have a surge protector buy one.
 
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I do have a surge protector, a circuit from the breaker, and a plug all dedicated to my PC and monitor. As for testing the parts, the computer I'm currently on is a much older pre-built one my parents use, so I would be unable to swap any parts to test them. The only extra parts I have are the other power supply and 4gb of ram which I have swapped for after testing each 4gb stick separately on my current set. I have also disconnected my 2tb hard drive, but it still froze after swapping those parts. It basically leaves me with a software problem, a CPU problem, an SSD problem, or a motherboard problem.

What I don't understand is why the problem didn't happen the entire two week span of not using a dedicated video card, but the problem persists almost immediately after receiving a new one. Perhaps I can try the card in the 3.0 PCIe slot and hope it's just a problem with the 2.0.
 
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Have you tried running a memory test on the system yet? The tests are free, not terribly difficult to perform, and will help eliminate memory modules as a source of the problem.

Windows Memory Diagnostic:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/diagnosing-memory-problems-on-your-computer

MemTest86:

http://www.memtest86.com/

MemTest86+:

http://www.memtest.org/

"the problem persists almost immediately after receiving a new one" You can't guarantee that a manufacturer will replace an RMA'd component with a new one. You could have received a board that passed verification at the RMA center, but still fails in the field.

Your best bet, if you suspect a bad graphics board, is to test it in a machine that works to see if the problem is reproducible. Even though your other system is older, you may very well be able to test the graphics card in it.

Also, I see you have a factory overclocked graphics card. The last person I recommend turning off browser hardware acceleration was having similar issues with a GTX 560 that was factory overclocked. Different brand, but I find the similarities convenient in this case. Does your system ever freeze when playing games? Does your system ever freeze when you do not have a web browser open?
 
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The computer I'm using doesn't have a pcie 2.0x16 slot, so no good there. I have also used the Windows diagnostic and memtest86 and neither one came up with issues after 10 passes on each stick. My system has froze while playing a couple games, but I don't recall if I had a browser open, though I can probably assume one of them was (Chrome would be the more likely of the two) since I have one up 90% of the time.

Was the person with the other 560 relatively recently? I've had this set up for about a year, including using both browsers, with no problems. The freezing only started happening about a month ago.
 
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Yes, it was recent. Probably within the last three months. His system would only experience the behavior when the browsers were open. Another coincidence, the other user was also using both Firefox and Chrome.

Here is a link to that thread:

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1654883/problem-display-driver.html

Another idea to consider would be to down clock the GTX 560 to the speed the chip is actually specified to run at, which I believe is 810 MHz and see if perhaps you didn't just receive a card with a marginal overclock on it. If you can stabilize the card by down clocking it, I would RMA it.
 
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At the moment I haven't had any problems. Thinking back for the past couple weeks where my 560 was RMA'd, while the computer never froze, flash crashed several times when both browsers were up. I always had to close out of Firefox and reload all the windows on Chrome. I don't know why the computer freezes and locks the mouse pointer into one shape instead of just having flash crash while my card is in, but I'm crossing my fingers for the hardware acceleration being the problem since it ties it with the video crashes.
 
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Well, perhaps there is some combination of Flash, Chrome, and Firefox that is not working well together at the current time. I find it odd that in your case, and that of the previous poster, you both seem to be using the combination of those browsers.

It very well could be a subtle driver issue. I know in Windows 8 the driver is now expected to compartmentalize graphics resources, so only a portion of the graphics card has to be reset if the driver detects a need for a driver reset, such as a misbehaving program. It could be a bug that has crept into NVIDIA's drivers due to the new features, and has accidentally carried over to other platforms. I'm really just taking a wild pot-shot here.
 
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It happened again after two days of what seemed rather promising, same exact problem. Freezing and mouse staying in a form of the capital "I" for a search or arrows which are used to adjust the sizes of windows. After the freezing started, I immediately closed out of the browser and pulled up HWMonitor and task manager to check for overheating and CPU usage. No spike for CPU and temps under 40 degrees for everything. The problem persisted after closing the browser so I checked the processes running to make sure there were no components of firefox still going and there weren't. Hardware acceleration has been disabled for Firefox and flash player both, so I guess that isn't the problem.

I've checked a few more times for problems specifically with the mouse and freezing, but I can't find anything and the mouse shape is really the only thing I can cling to as freezing itself is rather rampant.
 
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The problem happened again just now. I just finished installing a game. No browsers were up. I was unable to check CPU and temp, but considering they weren't the problem the first time, I doubt they were an issue this time. Processes running where basic Windows processes, Razer processes, and nvidia processes, so nothing new from last time.
 
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I had the 550W OCZ power supply, but I bought a Corsair CX500 since it wasn't too expensive. The OCZ has 30 amps I think, and the Corsair has 38 amps on the 12v rail. Exact same freezing problem with both power supplies.

This time, instead of freezing and the mouse cursor problems, it was freezing and the menu for copy, paste, etc was stuck on the screen, even after the freezing was finished. Still short periods of freezing over several minutes until I restart the computer.
 
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Reinstalling Windows was the first thing I did.
 
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That's what I'm currently using. I was using the OCZ before the storm but switched them out about 3 weeks ago.
 
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