My New Computer is Failing to Boot! - Update: Freezing Up Now!

That's basically it. I know how to do a lot of IT related things, but often as not I'll not have the time or inclination to do them. That's what I pay other people for. What I certainly do not do, is pay someone to do something then fix it myself when it screws up.

To take another spin on the "take it back" line of thinking, it could actually help the shop that put it together. If there are multiple guys there, and one is consistently making a mistake that's causing this, it could help them train him/her. Or, if they got a shipment of bad parts, it helps them identify it quicker if multiple people bring their systems in.

Jeff-66 wrote:

What I'm taking from this thread is: build your own computer (or learn to) :)

Scratched compares it to car repair, but really, it's more like LEGO repair. As long as you don't mind diagnosing and handling replacement parts yourself, the actual building and repair part is ridiculously easy. It's not at all like being a mechanic. That sh*t's hard.

There's really only one vaguely tricky bit left, mounting the motherboard in the case correctly. Everything else is just Tab A into Slot B.

If it was just assembling parts I'd agree with you, but thinking of the broader picture and all the hardware/software that comes together to make a useful computer, and how to diagnose/fix it when it goes wrong, I can see why many would just want to 'take it to the garage'.

Scratched wrote:

If it was just assembling parts I'd agree with you, but thinking of the broader picture and all the hardware/software that comes together to make a useful computer, and how to diagnose/fix it when it goes wrong, I can see why many would just want to 'take it to the garage'.

There are about a zillion step-by-step guides (incl. videos) online that show you how to do anything & everything related to computing. As Malor said, actual assembly isn't a lot more than a snap-together model, but the software installation part, setup and tweaking can be a bit time consuming.

For the average joe, building your own, including software, really isn't that much more than any other Saturday afternoon project.

Jeff-66 wrote:
Scratched wrote:

If it was just assembling parts I'd agree with you, but thinking of the broader picture and all the hardware/software that comes together to make a useful computer, and how to diagnose/fix it when it goes wrong, I can see why many would just want to 'take it to the garage'.

There are about a zillion step-by-step guides (incl. videos) online that show you how to do anything & everything related to computing.

And for many, the effort and time required to find and read/watch through all that stuff to fix a problem is simply not worth it. They'd rather pay a little money and let someone else spend their time on it.

I do it myself because I like fixing things myself. Apparently so do you. Not everybody is so inclined.

My very first build I had a similar issue to what you were/are exeriencing. Turns out the Motherboard was faulty (or I zapped it :/)

Recently just put together a decent rig to get back into PC gaming... mainly for D3.

I have a new issue with my computer freezing up! But first an update on my previous problems (I probably should have done this when the problem was solved!). Seems the motherboard was in fact the problem, I took it in to the shop I got it at, and they replaced the video card first up, after that didn't help, they replaced the motherboard, and I haven't had the same issue since. Yay!

But I now I have a fresh new problem, my computer is freezing up quite frequently. Been doing it for a couple of weeks now, but it seems to be getting worse, doing it earlier and more frequently. I'll probably have to take it in again, but I figure I'd try to run it past you all again, you're certainly all more computer savvy than I!

The freezing is instant, the screen doesn't go black, just freezes, all sound stops, and it becomes completely non-responsive. Alt-F4, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, Alt-Tab... nothing works. It generally only seems to happen when I'm running a game, after an hour or so. After the first time, it'll happen quicker for the rest of the night, after only 15-30 minutes, so it's making playing anything pretty much impossible. I don't have a lot of games for comparison since I've mostly been playing Diablo 3, but it has locked up in Minecraft as well which seems pretty low stress. When I'm browsing the net etc. it seems to be fine, it's only games so far that have triggered it.

Any ideas? Quick fixes that'll take me 5 minutes so I don't have to lug this bloody thing down to the shop again?

That sounds like a video card issue, probably inadequate cooling. Do you have decent airflow in the case?

It could just be a faulty card.

With the number of issues you're having with this machine, you should start thinking about a deeper cause, like perhaps a failing or inadequate power supply that's zorching other components.

Can you post a picture of the label on the side of your power supply?

I've been keeping an eye on my PC recently too as it's been having occasional freezes, that got a lot more frequent. I was thinking of the PSU (Corsair HX520, 3x18A 12V rails sharing 480W, according to this review as the label is in an awkward spot)as a culprit and was trying to monitor it at the moment it freezed to see if there was anything out-of-spec, which either meant having a window visible on my desktop all the time, or I use HWinfo which can log to file in the background, although who knows if it would write anything useful around the freeze. I did take a good look around my computer to make sure there was nothing obviously wrong with it, and for the last week it's been running fine. It's annoying because I don't know if I solved the problem such as a bad connection to some component, or whether it's just gone away for a bit.

Unfortunately they've got a warranty voiding sticker on the case so it's a bugger to open up and look at stuff without removing it. It's annoying, because I generally have some idea of what I'm doing inside a computer, and I hate taking my computer all the way to the store to fix something I could do with a screwdriver and 5 minutes work... I'll see what I can manage anyway.

Well, don't break your warranty sticker. But it sounds like a bum video card, and between that and the bad motherboard earlier, I can't help but wonder if something else is causing the failures.

Well I've been playing some Tribes: Ascend with the graphics maxed out, managed to play about an hour or so with no problem... computers are weird.

Seems like Diablo is the big killer, although I have no idea why.

Make sure you have all the power connectors plugged into the video card and that they're hot and that your power supply is sufficient. Video cards that freeze under load can be a variety of issues, but power is a pretty easy one to rule out.

A quick update for anyone interested, I've narrowed the problem down to Diablo III, which seems to consistently freeze my computer after an hour or so.

The bizarre thing is, it does very occasionally happen outside of Diablo, but it's very rare, generally after it's been running for a while (4 hours or more), and almost exclusively while I'm browsing the net, I don't think I've seen it occur once in another game since Minecraft (which I haven't really played since to test).

I haven't had time to take it in to the shop, and part of me wants to ignore the problem and just play Diablo on my laptop, but I can't help but feel that this might eventually grow into a bigger problem down the track as whatever is causing this slowly deteriorates more, and by then I may be out of warranty. Plus I'm afraid some other games may start doing the same thing. It's frustrating.

Have you trawled the D3 tech support forum for anyone with similar problems to you?

Stills sounds like a gpu problem. For all we know the graphics pipeline in Tribes is way better optimised than Diablo 3, maybe tribes uses much less of the DirectX11 era shaders etc.... I often find that the graphical detail I see can have little correlation with what the fan on my gpu is doing in different games.

I've got a fiver says the video card cooling fan isn't plugged in.

Maq wrote:

I've got a fiver says the video card cooling fan isn't plugged in.

+1

Maq wrote:

I've got a fiver says the video card cooling fan isn't plugged in.

I certainly might be able to check for that, I can't open the side panel because of the warranty sticker, but there are a few other openings I might be able to at least see if that's the case or not.

Run in windowed mode with GPU-Z monitoring it.

There's no way D3 would run for an hour with no cooling fan. Would never happen.

Malor wrote:

There's no way D3 would run for an hour with no cooling fan. Would never happen.

Yup, I played a bit last night with GPU-Z running as suggested (neat program!), started at around 40 degrees, hiked up to around 53 degrees, and after I quit out, it quickly sunk back to 40ish degrees, so I suspect my fan is working fine. I didn't have a chance to play for more than 45 minutes, but you'd expect a sharp increase in temperature beyond what I saw if the fan wasn't working.

Well, if the temp didn't go anywhere, then my guess is either a faulty card or flaky drivers. Have you tried updating them?

Redwing wrote:
Malor wrote:

There's no way D3 would run for an hour with no cooling fan. Would never happen.

Yup, I played a bit last night with GPU-Z running as suggested (neat program!), started at around 40 degrees, hiked up to around 53 degrees, and after I quit out, it quickly sunk back to 40ish degrees, so I suspect my fan is working fine. I didn't have a chance to play for more than 45 minutes, but you'd expect a sharp increase in temperature beyond what I saw if the fan wasn't working.

Try playing D3 with different video settings too. maybe try low quality, try with AA, without AA etc. Best suggestion yet though is to simply update the video drivers. The best way to do that, IMO, is to go into safe mode, uninstall the current drivers (just the drivers, don't uninstall Physx), reboot back into safe mode, and install the newest drivers.

If you have nvidia, the latest WHQL are 301.42, and the betas are 304.48 (<--- solves a lot of issues if you have a 600 series card).

I updated my drivers shortly after the problems started, and it didn't fix them, but I did only use the "Clean Install" checkbox in the Nvidia installer rather than a proper uninstall/reinstall as mentioned by Jeff-66, so maybe I'll give that a go with the latest beta driver you mentioned there. I'm not sure what version I have off the top of my head, I'm at work, but I'll check when I get home.

Have you looked in Event Viewer after it happens to see if anything got logged?

MannishBoy wrote:

Have you looked in Event Viewer after it happens to see if anything got logged?

I had a quick look, but I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. I found a few "6008" events which seem to indicate an improper shutdown, but the events either side of it don't reveal much, at least to my eyes, I haven't had much experience with Event Viewer.

I finally found what could be a (I quickly changed that from "is" as you can never be sure) 'smoking gun' for my recent computer problems. The stars aligned and it did a reboot while I was logging (using HWinfo), and over the last 27 seconds before it died the +5V line dropped to 4.328V and the +12V line increased to 12.112, when both are usually rock solid on 4.919/12.049 respectively.

After a load of double and triple checking everything, PSU is what I was probably going to replace anyway, but now there's little doubt. Hopefully that's useful for someone else in the future.

edit: The failed PSU was a Corsair HX520 coming up to 5 years old.

Well now Civ V is freezing my computer as reliably as Diablo 3 does, I'm guess I'm probably going to have to take this in to the shop again. Blargh!