System randomly crashes without any error

[Hawkest]

Hi,

 

i've an ageing system and i know i should just upgrade, but money is tight and i need this system for work, college and gaming.

 

System Spec:

Intel Core 2 Q9550 @ 3.4Ghz

Corsair Veangance LP 2x4GB, PC3-12800

Asus Striker 2 Extreme (most Recent bios 1402)

Corsair H100 cooler

nVidia GTX570 @ stock

Antec Quattro 850W

1 OCZ trion 256GB SSD

2x Samsung 1TB HHD

Corsair Air 540 all fans upgraded to SF and AF corsair fans

Monitor BenQ G2220HD not hdmi so connected via dvi

 

So i could be doing anything from gaming to word processing to watching a video on youtube when the monitor reads that it can't find a signal. one of three things happens next, the music and or sound continue but doesn't appear that i can do anything, the sound sticks or no sound at all.

 

I've made sure that all my drivers are up to date, which i do religiously, temperatures are fine, checked in event veiwer but it only ever records an unexpected system shutdown (me pressing the reset button).

 

I assumed it could have been the graphics card so i've borrowed a mates GTX 780 and with this card it does the same, then i thought it could be the power supply, but his GTX780 has Voltage leds that show that the power is correctly connected.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks Ben

 

[manikyath]

it could be the psu cables got iffy over time, because in all honesty, the connectors they decided to use on all power supplies are terrible.

 

you could try taking your cables out, and, using a tiny screwdriver, squeeze the "tubes" that make up the individual connections a bit tighter.

 

that's pretty much the only thing i can think of that wont cost you money, other than reinstalling your OS.

[Hawkest]

Cheers for the reply, i will give that a try. Cheers

[SaladFingers]

You might want to remove formatting from the text, it's almost unreadable for night theme users.

 

On topic: I would test another PSU if you can find one. Also try a different PCI port. Is your sound coming from your motherboard's on-board card? Or GPU hdmi?

 

Sometimes screen going black while other things are working is because of gpu drivers crashing.

[Hawkest]

2 minutes ago, SaladFingers said:

You might want to remove formatting from the text, it's almost unreadable for night theme users.

How do you mean, make it a single continuous list of components?

3 minutes ago, SaladFingers said:

On topic: I would test another PSU if you can find one. Also try a different PCI port. Is your sound coming from your motherboard's on-board card? Or GPU hdmi?

 

Sometimes screen going black while other things are working is because of gpu drivers crashing.

I have thought about getting a new psu for a while, not sure where i could find an alternative psu. but might ask about.

 

not thought about a different PCI-e slot, will swap it around and see what happens.

 

sound is coming from an asus supreme fx 2 plugged into a pci-e 1x slot.

 

Cheers

[Hawkest]

oh and wouldnt a gpu driver crash result in an system event being logged?

[SaladFingers]

4 minutes ago, Hawkest said:

How do you mean, make it a single continuous list of components?

I have thought about getting a new psu for a while, not sure where i could find an alternative psu. but might ask about.

 

not thought about a different PCI-e slot, will swap it around and see what happens.

 

sound is coming from an asus supreme fx 2 plugged into a pci-e 1x slot.

 

Cheers

No, I meant the font color. It's all light gray on top of a slightly darker background, I had to highlight everything in order to read

 

Do try swapping the PCI slots, you never know. Also yes, I think it normally should show up in event logs. Do you get nothing at all in your logs? Could be completely unrelated to software then.

[Hawkest]

nope nothing at all, i've tried manually looking and used whocrashed to check as well.

 

I've just posted normally using auto font colour.

[SaladFingers]

4 minutes ago, Hawkest said:

nope nothing at all, i've tried manually looking and used whocrashed to check as well.

 

I've just posted normally using auto font colour.

 

WhoCrashed looks for kernel dumps after a whole system crash. You should also check the Event logger to make sure.

 

About the fonts, you probably just pasted something that changed the formatting. Here's how your original post looks on night theme users: 

[Hawkest]

ah yeah i did... lol

 

the ram frequency

 

doh

[Hawkest]

i've edited it. has that worked?

[SaladFingers]

Yep. Frequency part still has the white highlighting, but the rest of the text looks proper now

[Hawkest]

Cool, cheers.

[Hawkest]

ok...

 

I've tried all three PCI-e slots on my motherboard and I get the same result. the system randomly freezes as before.

 

any more ideas?

 

is it a full re-install or could i roll back windows to the earliest recovery point?

 

Cheers Again