Proprius

Thus far, I have only gotten this crash when playing games. The past half-second or so of sound will loop and everything freezes, including the normal fall backs. I reset power to my computer to get things going again.

I've searched both this forum and others and have seen this problem a fair amount, but I also haven't found any strong consistencies between my system/the context in which my computer crashes and those of other people.

Attached is my dxdiag information, if it would help, but here are my less formal system specifications:

GeForce 9800 GTX (2)
Intel E8400 (Dual Core, 3.0 GHz)
4GB of DDR3 1333 Ram
XFX nForce 790i Motherboard
750W Power Supply

And here's some more anecdotal information about the crashing:

Some games seem to crash more than others, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the graphical fanciness of the game in question. (Company of Heroes crashes much more frequently than Age of Conan)

I read somewhere that it might be my memory and paging file maxing out, that my antivirus (ESET NOD32) takes up a rather large amount of the paging file. I've tried closing every non-essential process without any apparent affect.

When I manually turn down my fan speed, it seems to happen more often, but will still happen if they're at full blast (Fans are SilverStone 120mm with 110Cubic Feet/Minute, according to the box, and I have three of them in there, which I figure would be enough cooling.. it doesn't feel very hot from the outside, anyway.)

Power Supply might also be a bit low, but I'm not sure how that problem might manifest itself.

The crash has happened once when I wasn't running any games at all.

The crashing seemed to occur more frequently after I made some modifications, but I made several over the course of a few days and it's infrequent enough that I'm not positive which modification caused it. These modifications include swapping out a Wireless LAN card for a sound card, switching from the Intel stock cooler to an aftermarket cooler, getting a new iPod, getting a new drawing tablet, and installing manual speed controls for the fan.


And that's it. I tried to include as much information I could think of that might be useful. Thanks in advance for any help/time offered, and please ask if there's any other information that might help solve this.. I was putting up with it for awhile but it's gotten to be too much.

Attached Files

DxDiag.txt (53.5 KB, 8 views)

manic

What brand power supply? I would run a temp monitor, something
like speedfan. When you changed out the hsf, did you make sure
clean cpu, real well, and apply thermal compound as per instructions.
Did you insure you had a good tight bond to cpu with the hsf?
When you changed out cards, did you somehow change air flow..
Have you ran memtest? A flakey ram stick will act like this..
But to me it sounds like heat. A cheapo psu will make a system heat
up...You didnt get sucked into the $29.99 750watt piece o junk psu
did you? lol

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Proprius

I cleaned it quite well I think, used a full tube of Arctic Silver, and.. I think it's well-attached. It's a pretty bulky cooler, I think it would fall out if poorly attached.

I doubt the card change changed airflow, given where things are in the case.

Power Supply is made by Corsair - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139006
And I built this in a Lian-Li case that has the PSU pretty far from the motherboard and everything attached to it.

And I'll download and run memtest and speedfan, posting results after I've had enough time.

The reason I'm less sure it's heat is that I've talked to at least three other people who have had this problem, and read several other threads, and Windows Vista seems to be the common link. One of the people I talked to told me he switched back to XP and everything ran fine.

Proprius

Alright. I just played Call of Duty 4 for awhile, the game that tends to crash the least.

I'm not sure I trust this speedfan program entirely, though: the 'System' temperature has been locked at 119*C since I started running the program.

My CPU seems to idle at 40*C, 50*C at peak.

The 'Temp' column stays around 60*C.. It might be my video cards, but I have no idea.

jcgriff2

I don't see any way that you are "paging out" considering you have 2.5gb installed RAM and a page file allocated max of 6gb, with only 1gb in use at the time of the dxdiag report. Is your page file system managed, or do you override the settings with mix/max for each drive? Your page file really should not be more than 3.75gb - and the max would be 4gb. As a test on a BSOD case, I pushed my 2gb DDR2 system to the 4gb page file max - system set - and it started closing programs on me under DEP, while installed RAM sat just under 2GB in use (so, virtual memory hit the 6gb max for my system).

Also, is your system 32 bit (x86) or a 64 bit (x64)?

As for the sound issue - included in the thread title, I found some old audio drivers cmudax3.sys v5.12.0001.0008 (English) dated 2/2/2007 16:04:52 - Vista was publicly introduced in late January 2007. You should see if updates are available for this driver.

Please be sure to follow the advice of manic, as he is the hardware expert - not me!

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

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manic

Your werent serious when you said you used a whole tube of
artic silver were you..?

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Proprius

Uh.. I was, but the tube was about half the length of a pen and the same width.

System is 32-Bit.

Paging File is capped (not Vista-managed) at the max, right now. I only brought up the memory as a potential 'cause because I'd read it elsewhere.

I'll be looking for replacement drivers for that file.

Thanks to those who helped thus far!

manic

If its one of those little tubes, a little over a inch long you are referring
to. Thats enough compound for probably ten hsf's. Go to arctic
silvers website and see how they instruct you on how to apply the
paste. To much will cause it to overheat. May or may not be the
problem. But that can be the problem....How did memtest check out..

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Sean@HP

I suspect faulty RAM...

jcgriff2

If so, run memtest86+
http://www.memtest.org/

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

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Proprius

Just finished trying memtest. I got a weird 'Unexpected Inte rupt'.. here was the message:

Unexpected Inte rupt - alting

Type: 1x

This was during the Moving Inversions: 32 Bit Pattern test on 128K-2048M of my ram, with the hex 000000F0 , 39% through the test.

I watched the test going on until 10%, then wandered off. When I got back this was the message. Should I just run it again, since the dialogue said it had detected 0 errors with the Memory itself, or does all this mean anything to anyone?

I feel a bit silly about the Arctic Silver thing.

dai

with memtest you have to run it on 1 stick at a time
see what tepretures are doing with this app
http://www.download.com/Core-Temp/30...-10794077.html
set vista to control virtual memory

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Proprius

I wasn't sure how to do one stick at a time in memtest so I told it to test 0k through 2048m, which had no errors. Then I tried getting it to test 2049m through 4095m, which made memtest go a bit crazy.. so I set it back to the default test range of 0k through 50 thousand something M and tried running the full test again. It returned no errors.

I think that means that my RAM is fine?

I've updated that sound driver; we'll see if that makes things better.

coretemp is giving me the same temperature as speedfan for my cpu.

jcgriff2

The test is done on physical memory only - your system has 2.5gb - 2558mb per the dxdiag report.

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Proprius

That's the 32-Bit framework cap, I do believe.

jcgriff2

The 2048 or the 4096? 4gb is the 32-bit (x86) cap. But how can you test memory that is not there (i.e., above your installed 2558mb)? Any memory past that would be the page file, which is the HDD pagefile.sys. At least this is how a software person like myself understands it.

I know that pre-SP1 had problems ID'ing above 2048, but the hotfixes now rolled into SP1 recognizes the full 4gb - at least that is how I understand it. Dai or Manic from hardware could tell us for sure. I would think if you are running memtest on 1 stick at a time - it is just that - whatever memory the stick contains.

jcgriff2

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