NEW PC Serious Problems!

Raheel

Photoshop Mod
Joined
Mar 21, 2005
Messages
1,577
Location
Carrickmacross, Ireland
Car(s)
BMW E46 318 CI
Hi guys,

I am totally frustrated at this point now. I have built a brand new system, hardly been two days. The specs are as follows:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 @2.66 GHz
MSI P45D3 Platinum Motherboard
4 x OCZ PC3-10666 RAM chips
nVidia 9800 GX2
1x SATA DVD RW
1x IDE HDD Hitachi 250 GB.

The problem I am having is that the windows totally freezes, screen remains on a state when it freezes (i.e you see whatever was being displayed at the time) and the mouse doesn't move, nor does alt+ctrl+del do anything.

I have reformatted several times, checked RAM chips several times to make sure were fitted properly.

The longest I have gone without getting stuck was yesterday (about 2 hrs) also played Colin McRae Dirt at full settings with no problems.

Please let me know possible solutions.

By the way I have just loaded the fail safe settings in Bios now to see whether the problem was there, has been on for an hour now.

Thanks
 
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Sounds to me like your RAM is bad, try booting up with only one block at a time and see if that helps.
 
Everything freezing including the mouse is normaly caused by faulty ram.
Check your ram with memtest86. (let it run for several hours)
 
Make sure you rams are running at their manufacture's recommended voltage and timing. Sometimes the motherboard's default voltage is too low for the ram.
 
I have run memtest86 and no errors found.

Read about hte RAM chip and found out that the supply voltage should be 1.6v so i have manually increased that. Will leave the PC running and see the results.

Or should i really rip it with games to test if it can handle it? thanks for your feedback :)
 
I use OCCT for stability testing. If you have time, run the OCCT mix test, it'll stress both the ram and the CPU. If it passes 2 hrs without error, you system should be stable.

OCCT
http://www.ocbase.com/perestroika_en/
 
99% sure it's the RAM. Try it with just a single bank.
 
Are you sure your mobo doesn't need a bios update for the quad-core processor?
 
Will do a memory test now. hope that is the case.. and notihing worse

I have run memtest86 and no errors found.

To properly test the ram you have to let memtest86 run at least for the night, for something like 10-20 successful passes.
 
Do you have all the drivers installed? I had a similar problem before I installed the proper chipset drivers.
 
<snip>
The problem I am having is that the windows totally freezes, screen remains on a state when it freezes (i.e you see whatever was being displayed at the time) and the mouse doesn't move, nor does alt+ctrl+del do anything.

<snip>
By the way I have just loaded the fail safe settings in Bios now to see whether the problem was there, has been on for an hour now.

Thanks

You've basically triple faulted the CPU which is something not trapped by any software, so you see that "frozen" state.

This is usually a sure sign your memory timings / frequencies / speeds are too hot for your board or your RAM. First thing to check is if there is a boost mode on the RAM in the BIOS. If there is, turn it off or step it back to normal or slow or whatever.

Second thing is to then check the CAS latency and timings on your RAM vs. what's setup in the BIOS (MSI usually allows you to set them manually, but I haven't used an MSI board in while).

A bad stick of RAM tends to manifest itself more in random BSODs or hangs on POST or failure to POST at all. Generally it's not the cause of persistent freezes like this.
 
Had changed the RAM voltage to 1.6 and went off to work.. ran for around 5 hours before getting stuct. I have now changed the latency from Auto to 9-9-9-26 as specified by the OCZ on the RAM.

any other tweaks i should do with the RAM in bios? will let you know how it goes.
 
sounds like ram problem as well.

like fluke667 suggested, memtest should do the job.

how long did you leave memetest running for?
 
I had the ram test for around 2 hrs.

I have read in OCZ forums where a guy had problem with using 4x1GB ram chips and was having random freezes as well, but none with 2 chips. the mods there specified him with the exact settings to use in bios. And he repoted back saying pc was stable.

I have posted there to see what settings i should use.
 
Good news guys....

PC is finally stable, been running for 24 hrs now :D . Got it to be stable by manually changing the RAM Voltage to 1.84v and latency settings to 9-9-9-26 as you guys suggested.

Thanks a lot for all your help.
 
Your RAM is rated at 1.85V not 1.5 (DDR3 base standard) so that's why its working. Just like DDR2 the standard is 1.8V but most "high performance" RAM requires 2.1V or more to run stable. Also many motherboards or chipsets can act up when filling all 4 DIMM slots so that also may not have helped.

If you don't mind me asking what made you decide to go with DDR3 over DDR2 on a P45 platform?

Also you forgot to mention the most important component.... the power supply! I hope you have a good one!
 
I was about to say that...I though my ram was unstable, but I had a PSU going bad...But again if it ran 24 hours stable then I think things should be fine.
 
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