Random Crashing to Desktop or Grey Screen

[Thaid]

Hey guys,

 

I'm having a problem with my setup suddenly. Not sure if its from updating drivers but when gaming (Dota2, SC2) it would randomly 'crash' to my desktop but I wouldn't be able to click anything until I CTRL+ALT+DEL the game. Time varies between 5 minutes to 20 minutes of gameplay. Also worse case I would crash completely with a Grey screen sometimes just a black screen and would require a hard boot. However, running Heaven Benchmark for 30 minutes on each GPU and then in crossfire, I've had no artifacts, overheating, or abnormal readings (I still eventually crash to desktop).

 

Stuff i've diagnosed:

- Not temperatures for CPU/GPU. (all water cooled)

- Not power supply. (tried replacing for a 1000W)

- Tried latest, older, and beta Catalyst drivers after clean wipe each time

 

Odd stuff I've noticed:

-RAM shows 1600 even though its 1866 at 1.5V with manual set timings

-Parts of my Windows 8 have gone missing. (ex. when I went to uninstall a program, some buttons such as the 'Uninstall' and 'Repair' buttons were gone. Also, when I right click my desktop I would have a 'Display' menu instead of the usual 'Resolution etc' menu.

 

System specs:

i5 3570k

2x Radeon 6970

Asus Maximus IV Gene Z/Gen 3

2x 4GB G.Skill Sniper 1866MHz @ 1.5V 

Corsair 1000W and XFX 750W PSU

Windows 8 Pro WMC

All in custom water cooling

 

Any suggestions? I don't know what to do anymore. :(

[tito]

Are you overclocking any part of the system? I can get my VGA to run Heaven Benchmark without any issue at 1200 core, 1450 mem, and it would crash after five minutes of Call Of Duty with those clocks.

[Thaid]

I have the same results with over clocking, under clocking, and stock speeds on both CPU and GPUs. I tested HDMI, DVI, and VGA dedicated monitors. Also tried reseating gpus, cpu, and RAM sticks.

[ProCoComputerRepairs]

Could possibly be the Ram, try running some test on them one by one with Memtest86 to see if any errors occur.

[Thaid]

A little update!

 

-Tried memtest on my current RAM and tried my other DIMM slots with a new pair of RAM sticks. Same results.

-Thought it was my double crossfire bridges. No results.

-Did a clean install of Windows 8. Same results.

 

My games and Heaven Benchmark are still suddenly crashing and need to be terminated through the task manager. Anyone have any other ideas?

[Midnight]

update the bios?

[Thaid]

-Updated bios on motherboard, and video cards. Same result.

-Tried running a 7870 on load. No crashing.

 

My thoughts so far,

-Could be Crossfire problem

-Could be Windows 8 problem

-Could be the actual video cards..

 

Next things to test,

-Individual PCIe Cards to verify it is not a motherboard issue.

-Individual GPU testing on each individual PCIe slot with a PCIe extension bridge.

 

If anyone has any other suggestions please post freely!