Lots of crashing

So for about a day and a half now I have gotten a lot of crashes on my system. A lot of them while gaming. "Mass Effect 3.exe has stopped working", "bf3.exe has stopped working", "FNV.exe Has stopped working", etc etc. I initially thought it was CPU being overclocked very slightly to 3.8, so I defaulted back and played again. Same thing. So, I thought maybe it was my GPU overclock on my card, so I went back to stock on that as well. Same thing. I thought it might be my mods for Fallout New Vegas so I uninstalled those as well. Same thing. Nothing changed. It seems to be random. I can go a 3 hours crash free, then it crashes. Or I can last 15 minutes.

For about the last 5 hours it has started locking the system on me and going to a white screen with sound blasting through my headphone. Not a rigning, but a very loud banging/ loud buzz. I have not put my headphones on since because I think it nearly made me deaf. I have stressed the CPU and no lock ups. I tested the memory in Windows using Prime95 custom. No crash. I am about to start the run through some GPU stress tests. Just wondering if anyone else has any kind of idea what is happening? Event viewer has no logs on any of the crashes, but it does log the applications crashing. Just not the lock ups. The CPU and Mobo are both brand new and the GPU only 5 months old, if that. The ram is a little older, probably 8 months?

I have two HDDs, one a 320gig Seagate that holds my OS and Origin and the other, a 1TB Wester Digital, holds Steam and Misc. items. I used the 1TB for a windows on my old system but I did a format of it when I installed windows on the 320 gig. Both are not even close to being filled yet. Might be a PSU issue, but I would have no idea how to test that properly. Get another one and see if it works, I guess?

Any help would be appreciated, as gaming becomes some kind of computer version of russian roulette.


EDIT: In case anyone wants it my rams part number is: F3-12800CL9-4GBXL. They are running the XMP profile.

Try stressing your GPU. I had a GTX 560Ti a while ago with a similar problem. You should also check your PSU if the system is getting enough power. What PSU are you using anyway ? I hope it's not something less than 650Watts.

What are you using to stress test the diffrent components? I would recommend prime 95 on the small fft setting for the cpu. Test it for atleast a couple of hours.. You might want to try memtest 86 to doublecheck the ram. I once had a bad ram even though they checked out fine in any ram tests, so you might want to try with only one memorystick and see if that changes anything. Also, download cpuz and check the the voltage and the ram settings.
+1 on gpu stress test

thekillerlama said:

What are you using to stress test the diffrent components? I would recommend prime 95 on the small fft setting for the cpu. Test it for atleast a couple of hours.. You might want to try memtest 86 to doublecheck the ram. I once had a bad ram even though they checked out fine in any ram tests, so you might want to try with only one memorystick and see if that changes anything. Also, download cpuz and check the the voltage and the ram settings.
+1 on gpu stress test

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Prime 95 blend, 1 hour for the CPU. Prime 95 custom using 7 gigs of my 8 gigs of ram available to test the ram. 2 hours. Both passed. No crashes. GPU is next up and I plan on using Furmark to test that, both at stock and overclocked speeds for about an hour on both. I know it's not a heat issue because I never get above 60 degrees while playing BF3 so I suspect I'll pass that. Ran a scan disk of the 1TB HDD that just finished up. No errors on that drive reported. Rebooting now to test my main drive. Ram setting being reported correctly in CPUz, I'll post screens of the memory tab and speed tab.

Memtest is on the list of things to do. Just slowly making my way towards it.

Once you run the GPU test, then run Prime 95 and Furmark at the same time.

You don't mention your PSU, please give us specifics on it.

here are some things to try.

THIS IT HAS WORKED FOR ME MANY TIMES

1. run disk cleanup first on all drives, then disk defragmentor second on all drives

2. if that does not work, try reinstalling the drivers COMPLETELY from your system. this means erasing the drivers off your desktop and then reinstalling them back on the pc.

3. run some disk checking utils

4. run spybot, malwarebytes, avg, and microsof defender scans.

4. check for a bios update

5. check the power supply

hopefully this should help.

A description of the power supply would help.

The Gigabyte GA Z77X UD3H and GA Z77X UD5H have been known to have issues.
Have you made any BIOS changes?

Conumdrum said:

Once you run the GPU test, then run Prime 95 and Furmark at the same time.

You don't mention your PSU, please give us specifics on it.

Click to expand...

woboy said:

A description of the power supply would help.

The Gigabyte GA Z77X UD3H and GA Z77X UD5H have been known to have issues.
Have you made any BIOS changes?

Click to expand...

Sorry guys. I feel asleep.

Power supply is a Seasonic 750Watt, 80+ silver. Pretty old.

Okay, so I set up the Furmark test to run along side the Prime95 blend test and.... the temps skyrocketed on me. I went to the bathroom and came back to those temps. I stopped the test when I noticed they kept rising in temps. Temps are a lot higher than I have ever seen. Prime95 takes it to about 80ish and BF3 never sees it leave 70 degrees.

scrambler said:

View attachment 115585

Okay, so I set up the Furmark test to run along side the Prime95 blend test and.... the temps skyrocketed on me. I went to the bathroom and came back to those temps. I stopped the test when I noticed they kept rising in temps. Temps are a lot higher than I have ever seen. Prime95 takes it to about 80ish and BF3 never sees it leave 70 degrees.

Click to expand...

now that i applied some careful thinking

what graphics card are you using? i believe you may have either bad drivers or a bad card.

ATI 7950 using CCC 12.8.

scrambler said:

ATI 7950 using CCC 12.8.

Click to expand...

this may sound ridiculous, but have you tried blowing the dust out of the heatsinks?

if you are sure its clean on the inside you may want to get it replaced...or just wait until it goes away. i remember this guy on you tube named reviewtechusa who had the same problem until one day it just magically went away.

Pretty clean case. I have filters on all my intake fans that I clean about once a week. I guess I'll look though. No harm. Just happened again playing ME3. Hard lock and only option is hard restart

Well, I uninstalled Cat 12.8. Running back with 12.7Bs again. No crashes for about the last hour and a bit of gaming.

EDIT: If it is the drivers, why did it take so long for me to notice the adverse effects? Nearly 4 weeks?

I don't understand the logic of running both Prime95 and Futuremark at the same time. Then you have even less chance of knowing whether the GPU or the CPU/memory is causing the problem. First you need to eliminate the CPU/memlory or their bios settings as being the problem. I would completely uninstall CCC and run Prime95 for a couple hours while using only the native Microsoft drivers for the video. Don't stress the GPU. Prime95 blend will stress both the CPU and the ram. Then if all is well you can conclude the video card or drivers is the problem.

Is this computer overclocked?

sounds like its drivers then.

use driver sweeper to clean out all ATI/AMD drivers, then re-install cat 12.8. see if that helps.

Finding the right diagnosis might be a tricky thing sometimes. The easiest solution is to follow the process of elimination as trents pointed out. Also, the timing of these crashes might seem kind of random. I had a system before that would be rock stable months before it started to crash, and basically became usless for about two days. Then suddenly it would seem stable again. This happened two or three times before i figured out it was the ram.
Moral of the story: Do what trents says

trents said:

I don't understand the logic of running both Prime95 and Futuremark at the same time. Then you have even less chance of knowing whether the GPU or the CPU/memory is causing the problem. First you need to eliminate the CPU/memlory or their bios settings as being the problem. I would completely uninstall CCC and run Prime95 for a couple hours while using only the native Microsoft drivers for the video. Don't stress the GPU. Prime95 blend will stress both the CPU and the ram. Then if all is well you can conclude the video card or drivers is the problem.

Is this computer overclocked?

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It's more of a load test for temp and PSU issues. Not much help for the other bits that you mention. Once we knew his PSU, I doubted it was the PSU, he did say it was old. It was only happening during gaming it seems, so coulda been the PSU.

trents said:

I don't understand the logic of running both Prime95 and Futuremark at the same time. Then you have even less chance of knowing whether the GPU or the CPU/memory is causing the problem. First you need to eliminate the CPU/memlory or their bios settings as being the problem. I would completely uninstall CCC and run Prime95 for a couple hours while using only the native Microsoft drivers for the video. Don't stress the GPU. Prime95 blend will stress both the CPU and the ram. Then if all is well you can conclude the video card or drivers is the problem.

Is this computer overclocked?

Click to expand...

I already eliminated the CPU and memory to an extent by running Prime95 blend for an hour and custom for 2 hours using the full available memory. The furmark and Prime run was to see if it was a power issue.

No crash yet and the only thing I have changed is the PCI-e slot and what version of Cat I am running.

The GPU was overclocked, the CPU was overclocked to 3.8 with a very slight voltage increase.

@scrambler
You should try a different PSU. The power supply can cause problems like this, and since your's is pretty old, it might be the cause, so I would check in on that...