Vertical lines crash, have tried everything I can think of.

[excella1221]

Hi everyone. I used to be very active here pre-website overhaul. Mostly hung out in the Systems section helping people out with their builds in varying budgets. I now seek your expert advice as I am out of ideas.

I've had this PC since January 2013. It's worked perfectly until recently.

Specs:
- i7-3770K
- ASRock z77 Extreme6
- Powercolor Radeon HD 7950
- OCZ Vertex 4 128gb
- WD Caviar Blue 1TB
- Seasonic M12II 520w
- G.Skill Sniper 2x4gb

It started at about 5 days ago, I wasn't doing anything new or special, it just happened out of nowhere. I'm not very good at describing, but I found pictures (courtesy of Google) that look EXACTLY like what I'm seeing.
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g138/batmx3man/DSC07455.jpg

or sometimes like this,
http://oi49.tinypic.com/34qpsnr.jpg

I've experienced both. There doesn't seem to be a steady background color when it crashes -- sometimes white, green, red, I've even seen flesh-y color.

Stuff I've tried:
- GPU stress test: Unigine Heaven with tesselation and x4 AA. Ran it for about an hour-ish, no crash.
- Memory: Memtest86, ran it for about 2 hours, no errors.
- sfc /scannow
- Updated catalyst driver. (I was on 14.12 for 7 months, only updated now to 15.7 thinking it's the driver)
- OCCT test for CPU, GPU, and Power Supply.
- downclocked GPU from 800/1250 to 790/1150.
- messed with voltages in the BIOS/UEFI

I've researched high and low, but I've never found a definitive answer. At one point, my research pointed a lot to my video card dying, but I'm just not convinced it is.

What's making this harder is there's no 100% way to replicate the crash at will. It just happens when I play games like Dota 2, which isn't even a graphically taxing game. The only other stuff open when it crashes aside from Dota 2 is of course Steam, and Google Chrome tabs.

 

[ctsvette]

How old is the monitor? You've tested just about everything else, have you considered that it might be the monitor itself that's dying?

 

[HEXiT]

amd driver crash. when i first got my hd 5870 i would get the same. it was caused in part by having hpet disabled while running windows 7 and the amd driver being very new.
chances are you have installed a new driver and it has compatability issues with your card. try an older whql version.
and if your running win 7 enable hpet (if available) in bios.

its more than likely hpet will fix it as it was the root cause of the driver crash.
after i set it. i never got the screen again until i updated to a beta driver about 3 years later. (removed it and no more issues)

 

[excella1221]

How old is the monitor? You've tested just about everything else, have you considered that it might be the monitor itself that's dying?

I bought it the same time as the PC, so around 2.5 years. The system locks up and even audio does this inexplicably annoying sound on a loop though, so I don't think it's the monitor.

amd driver crash. when i first got my hd 5870 i would get the same. it was caused in part by having hpet disabled while running windows 7 and the amd driver being very new.
chances are you have installed a new driver and it has compatability issues with your card. try an older whql version.
and if your running win 7 enable hpet (if available) in bios.

its more than likely hpet will fix it as it was the root cause of the driver crash.
after i set it. i never got the screen again until i updated to a beta driver about 3 years later. (removed it and no more issues)

This started happening even when I was on the 12.14 catalyst though, which I've been using since December of last year, so I ruled out the driver being the problem. It's the first I've heard of HPET, I will be visiting the BIOS after posting this to toggle it and see if it fixes anything.

 

[HEXiT]

lol mate like i said i never had the issue for about 3 years. after i first solved it with hpet.
which pretty much put me at the release of 12.14 for december last year. try 14.4 i found they worked well with my card.

hopefully hpet fixed it though.

 

[excella1221]

lol mate like i said i never had the issue for about 3 years. after i first solved it with hpet.
which pretty much put me at the release of 12.14 for december last year. try 14.4 i found they worked well with my card.

hopefully hpet fixed it though.

I'm sorry for the confusion. What I meant to say was I've been using 12.4 since it got released, and this crash only started happening 5 days ago.

Anyway, it appears HPET is enabled by default on my BIOS. I've disabled it for now, hopefully it fixes my problem. D:

 

[HEXiT]

nah mate if your using win 7 then it needs to be on.
sorry but i thought you were using 15.7. in that case i would recomend you go back to your old driver. you will only loose about 3-4% in most games.
although you may have problems with new titles like batscam (oops batman)

 

[excella1221]

Alright, after disabling and enabling HPET, neither fixed the crash. I've tried Catalyst 14.4, 14.12, and 15.7 so far, no fix. I really don't know what to do at this point aside from maybe re-installing Win7.

 

[HEXiT]

check your vrm temps see if there overheating but also check the event logs.

 

[excella1221]

I ran OCCT tests again. The vertical lines crash happens around 5~10 seconds of running the PSU test. After that, I reset or power it off, and it will fail to POST or boot for about an hour of turning it on/off, then it will magically start normally again.

Right now I'm thinking either the motherboard or the PSU is starting to fail. Thoughts?

 

[HEXiT]

looks like your gonna be emailing seasonic unless the psu is less than a year old then the shop you bought it from will handle it.
the psu comes with a 5 year warranty so getting it replaced shouldnt be an issue.

 

[excella1221]

Unfortunately, it's almost 3 years old. I don't mind buying a new one, I might even go for an XFX 650w ProSeries this time if the PSU really is the problem, but is there any way to make 100% certain? I don't have any spare PSUs lying around, so that's not an option atm.

It could still be the motherboard starting to act up.

 

[HEXiT]

unless you can test it in another build i would say get in touch with seasonic. they will honour the guarantee but it may be a bit of a chore getting the seller to send you a copy of your receipt.
if they do exchange it then put it on ebay and recoup some cash to help cover the cost of the new psu.