Recurring Blue Screen

[InToLn]

I built a system about six months ago, and have been getting crashes and blue screens infrequently since. I've reinstalled Windows a few times to no effect. Lately it's been happening about once per day. There doesn't seem to be any particular trigger. When it crashes the video freezes and there's a loud buzzing sound. It doesn't restart on its own. When it bluescreens I get a simple message telling me that there's a hardware malfunction. It's not the GPU because I originally had a 5830 but replaced it with a 660ti, and the problem persisted. I'm not very knowledgeable in the area of hardware, so any suggestions on where to start would be great.

Components:
i7-2600k
NVIDIA 660ti
ASRock Z77
G.SKILL DDR3 1600--2x8gb
ADATA Premier Pro 128gb SSD
PC Power Silencer Mk II 750W

 

[tcottrell]

I had a similar problem a couple months ago, turned out to be a bad memory module, after replacing my set, no more BSOD's

I built a system about six months ago, and have been getting crashes and blue screens infrequently since. I've reinstalled Windows a few times to no effect. Lately it's been happening about once per day. There doesn't seem to be any particular trigger. When it crashes the video freezes and there's a loud buzzing sound. It doesn't restart on its own. When it bluescreens I get a simple message telling me that there's a hardware malfunction. It's not the GPU because I originally had a 5830 but replaced it with a 660ti, and the problem persisted. I'm not very knowledgeable in the area of hardware, so any suggestions on where to start would be great.

Components:
i7-2600k
NVIDIA 660ti
ASRock Z77
G.SKILL DDR3 1600--2x8gb
ADATA Premier Pro 128gb SSD
PC Power Silencer Mk II 750W

 

[InToLn]

Is there a way to test this without replacing the memory? I'd be glad if it was the problem since it'd be relatively cheap to replace, but at the same time I'd rather not spend the money unless I'm sure.

 

[chugot9218]

I would start with your RAM and running Memtest to see if you have a stick going bad.

Or you can try running with only 1 stick at a time and doing something that would replicate the problem, and see if it still happens.

 

[InToLn]

I ran Memtest and didn't get any errors.

 

[InToLn]

I have to bump this to update the problem. My computer just sort of stopped crashing for the last couple of months, I have no idea why. Nothing changed in the way I used it. Over the last couple of days, however, the issue came back. I didn't think enough of this to include it in my original post, but my system clock also becomes incorrect--not just when the computer restarts, but randomly while it's on. This also happened when my system crashed and got BSODs before, and again hasn't happened until just recently when it started crashing again. This makes it seem like a motherboard issue, but I don't really know where to start in diagnosing it. I tried updating my BIOS, but couldn't find the ASRock BIOS update page for my specific motherboard. I have a Z77 Extreme4-M, but the only motherboard similar to mine on the ASRock list (http://www.asrock.com/support/download.asp?cat=BIOS) was the Z77 Pro-4 M. Obviously I don't want to risk installing the wrong BIOS.

If anyone could give me help on where to go from here, it would be very much appreciated. Thanks.





Don't...

Bump posts


http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/283384-33-read-first