Trying To Diagnose Problem(s) in my Old Rig

[subiedude7]

This is my old rig:
i5 750
Gigabyte P55USB3
Radeon HD4870/HD7850 (not Crossfire, I just own both cards)
2x4GB Gskill Ripjaws DDR3
Antec EarthWatts EA650
Samsung 840 EVO SSD
Windows 7 64 Bit

Issues:
1. For as long as I remember, the display will randomly not show when booting up, forcing me to cut the power and try again OR the PC will lose power while booting and reboot itself seconds later(the former is more common than the latter).
2. Right now I am using my 4870 because I cannot get my 7850 to display when booting up (yes, I have tried reinstalling Windows 7 and all applicable drivers). After multiple attempts of rebooting the PC to get the 7850 to display, I got it to display once/twice on HDMI but there were green lines on the screen.
3. The most nagging problem which has been in more recent weeks, is my computer will hard freeze no matter if I am gaming, idle or surfing the web.
4. This has only happened once in recent memory, but the computer powered off randomly while I was in Windows.
5. I have gotten multiple BSODs in the past few weeks but only 1 since the Win 7 reinstallation....MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION. I downloaded a minidump reader and googled it. Something related to a hal.dll


Things I have tried to diagnose the problem:
1. Tested every stick of ram with Memtest in each DIMM slot (no errors)
2. Ran Intel Diagnostic CPU tool (CPU passed all tests and temperatures were fine)
3. I tried both graphics cards in different PCIE slots and still would get the hardfreeze (the 7850 wont even display anymore)
4. Tested each rail of the PSU under load with a multimeter (voltages are in spec)
5. Downloaded Samsung Magician and Hard Disk Sentinel (drive health is stated to be Good)

Odd observation: Yesterday it was hardfreezing every few minutes, and strangely Win 7 tried to push a bunch of updates through for me to download. I disabled Windows 7 updates last night and have not had a hard freeze since. I have only installed Service Pack 1 since I reinstalled Windows 7 because I wanted to make sure it wasn't a bad update that was giving me issues on my previous installation of Windows.

 

[Mr.Scott]

What motherboard?

 

[subiedude7]

Gigabyte P55USB3 (edited the OP)

 

[trents]

Is it overclocked?

 

[subiedude7]

No overclocks. Optimized default BIOS settings.

 

[Vishera]

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers...ndows-fails-machine-check-exception-bsod.html

Same CPU, motherboard, and SSD, says flashing the BIOS worked for him. Maybe start there?

 

[subiedude7]

I flashed the BIOS to the most current version a long time ago unfortunately.

Glad you brought that up, because I was having the boot up issues (#1 in my list of issues) for years, so I had tried flashing the BIOS back then to fix it. Now of course, I have a slew of other problems.

 

[trents]

So reinstalling Windows 7 and disabling updates fixed the hard freezes but not other problems. Correct?

It sounds like you have multiple organ failure going on. All the hardware is very old and the symptoms you describe are what we would expect seeing in a system with that many miles. Trying to diagnose the various issues can be time consuming and expensive because at some point it's a matter of just swapping out components and some of them may not even be available, at least not new. Sounds like it would be similar to herding cats but just more expensive.

Are you in a position budget wise to put together a new system?

 

[subiedude7]

Yeah I am at my wits end. None of the troubleshooting I have done points to any piece of hardware in particular. I am building a new system this week. Fingers crossed that it all works out.

I am recycling my 21.5" ASUS 5ms display to my new build. I spent a chunk of change that I did not really want to, so I decided to pass on a new display. You don't think the display crashes on startup (old rig) would be linked to the LCD do you? I guess I'll find out in due time...

 

[trents]

Well, going with an old monitor is a safer path than going with other used old components. I guess you will find out about the reliability of the monitor soon enough.