BSODs happening randomly, Z68 based PC

rxb216 · 09 Feb 2013

Hi All,

My first post here. I have a modest machine that has been experiencing a few BSODs everyday. This has been happening for the past several months, but now I am annoyed with it. Sometimes the crashes happen while the PC is in use, and sometimes when no one is even touching the PC and it is idle.

Some details:

Motherboard: ZOTAC [Z68ITX-A-E]. Bios version: 2K111011.
I have not installed the 2K120619 update since it is only applicable for Ivy Bridge CPUs that I don't have

CPU: Intel i7-2600k (Sandy Bridge not overclocked)
GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti (not overclocked)
HDD: Crucial M4-CT128M4SSD2 (firmware 040H)
TV USB: Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1950

I have a really good Lian Li case that provides a lot of air flow. The PC is actually in my kitchen, and i dont use it gaming, just for watching cooking shows here and there, and watching TV when the wife makes me do the dishes.

I have ran the "Verifier" in order to collect more useful dumps, however after running this for 48 hours, the crashes did not happen any more frequently, not did the dumps did not look any more verbose. The PC is set to dump "kernel memory". I think I have more RAM than is allowed for "full system dump", so I dont have that setting.

After I looked at the dump files with windows debugging tools, I can't see to deduce what might be at fault.

Arc · 10 Feb 2013

Hello rxb216. Your crashes are stop 0x124, which is caused by hardware.

Code:

*******************************************************************************
*                                                                             *
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                                    *
*                                                                             *
*******************************************************************************

Use !analyze -v to get detailed debugging information.

BugCheck 124, {0, 8862201c, be200000, 11166}

Probably caused by : GenuineIntel

Followup: MachineOwner
---------

To find out the failing hardware, what we need to do is to follow the guide: Stop 0x124 - what it means and what to try

rxb216 · 10 Feb 2013

Hi Arc,

Thanks for your reply. It seems that 0x124 are painful to debug. The guide you sent me looks useful and I will attempt those suggestions, though it is unfortunate I don't have more clues to rely on. I have updated all my drivers, with the exception of the latest BIOS (since Zotac said that was only relavent for Ivy Bridge users). I have some alternate RAM I can try, but I don't have another CPU to try.

Let me ask you this, the ZIP file in my post contained a lot of dump files (from many crashes over the past few weeks). Did they all point to the 0x124 error? I'd like to know this before I go about trying to debug...

Arc · 10 Feb 2013

rxb216 said:

Let me ask you this, the ZIP file in my post contained a lot of dump files (from many crashes over the past few weeks). Did they all point to the 0x124 error? I'd like to know this before I go about trying to debug...

I havent checked them all, but all the latest ones are pointing to stop 0x124. And as far as the chance of stop 0x124 exists, no other troubleshooting will be any effective; it will continue to crash. So it is better to eliminate the stop 0x124.

And you are right. A stop 0x124 with the first parameter is 0x0 (machine check exception) makes the debugger helpless with the dump data. I can say you that some machine check exception occurred there, that the processor recognized and told the operating system to record a crash dump.