Crashtastic

[Banzai_Kitty]

I built a new PC about a year ago and for long while, everything ran fine. About 3-4 months ago however, it started crashing repeatedly while playing games. Sometimes it'll play for hours before crashing, other times it won't last 10 minutes.


The most common crash is a just straight freeze with graphical or sound distortion. Others include it just rebooting of it's own accord, or various BSODs such as "irql_less_or_equal", "system service exception", "bad pool header".

Upon crashing, it takes about 1/2 a dozen reboots for it to restabilize, doing anything from refusing to post, freezing when I enter BIOS or anywhere up to 1min after entering Windows.

I've updated all drivers, BIOS; wiped, formatted and reinstalled Windows, run driver and registry cleaners, just got the video card back from being RMA'd, tested the memory and about anything else I can think of. Event Viewer's critical errors aren't giving any more info than "kernel power error".

Specs:

- AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4ghz
- Asus M4A785TD-V Evo mobo
- Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 5770 1gb
- 4x 2gb OCZ DDR3 1066mhz RAM (despite all being the same model, looking at them shows that 2 sticks are 7-7-7 timing? while the other 2 are 9-9-9 not sure of the significance though)
- Antec 500W PSU
- generic DVD DL R/W +/- burner
- 1tb WD 7200rpm HDD

All BIOS settings are at auto/default. It runs fine during run of the mill stuff like browsing, even with a lot of tabs open, using Office, etc.

I'm suspecting either:
a)the mobo is in some way faulty
b)gaming pushes the machine to use the extra RAM, which doesn't get along with each other?
c)gaming pushes the machine to use more power than the PSU is reliably supplying

but really I have no idea, so any suggestions would be much appreciated.

[chiyio]

since you already suspect the ram, try running it with just 1 stick at a time and see what happens. I'd start there. Can also set the ram to super conservative settings for testing. like set them to 10-10-10 or something. Make sure they're at the right voltage as well.

somebody can probably double check for you, but is a 500w power supply going to be enough for that setup? I'd think it should be, but I don't know enough about ATI cards to say offhand.

[guartz]

Upon crashing, it takes about 1/2 a dozen reboots for it to restabilize, doing anything from refusing to post, freezing when I enter BIOS or anywhere up to 1min after entering Windows.

pop the case and scan your mobo for popped transistors/scorch marks.