Freezing when playing games

Hi All,

I really don't know where exactly to classify my problem, so I guess I will just put it in this thread for the meantime.

These are my current specs:

Win 7 64-bit Home Premium
E8500 C2D 3.16GHz
Maximus II Formula
Powercolor HD5970
Sound Blaster X-Fi (not sure on the exact model - it came with the Maximus II)
2 x 4GB Corsair Dominator 1066 DDR2
3 x 500GB Seagate Barracuda 32MB Cache
HX1000 Coolermaster 1000W PSU

I am currently experiencing quite a puzzling problem with my system which is only occurring now after 2 years of gaming. To properly describe it - whenever I play certain games on Steam the screen freezes at the loading screen with no other way of recovering other than doing a hard reboot. A sample of these would be R.U.S.E., Plants vs. Zombies, and King's Bounty. I tried to play games without using Steam such as Starcraft 2, and the same thing happens. The other puzzling thing is, I tried Civ 5, but this did not make the system hang, but when I tried to play it, it leads to slowdowns after a brief period of time. To be honest, I haven't tried it with any other games, but the fact that this is happening with these particular games (when it shouldn't) is most alarming. Currently though, as long as I don't run any games and only surf, use YM, play movies and music

Before I go further - these are the remedies which I have attempted to do to possibly come to a conclusion as to what is the problem:

I used to run my system with Vista 64-bit Home Premium. When the above mentioned problems started happening - I figured to just upgrade to Win 7 and be done with it. I backed up all my games, reformatted my HD and did a fresh install of everything and installed everything with the latest drivers I have. I have just done so and the problem still persists as described. I figured that this might have something to do with the GPU. I attempted to capture the core temps of everything using Speedfan and Catalyst, but all I managed to get were the idle temps as follows:

System - 29C
CPU - 33C
AUX - 30C
Core 0 - 39C
Core 1 - 41C
HD5970 - 44C

The running temps I couldn't get anymore as the system just freezes when I run the programs mentioned. When I alt+tab from Civ 5, it then proceeds to freeze.

I have also tried to make a combination of driver rollbacks for Catalyst - completely uninstalling 10.9 and rolling back to 10.7 and 10.5 - which used to work very well for me before with still the same problems. I have also tried to take out the GPU, cleaned it up, and put it back in (after cooling) and the same thing still happens. I can't take the installation of XP 64 bit route as I don't own a license - only have Vista and Win 7 64 bit.

At this point I am at wit's end as to what to do and I am seeking the forums for some help as to whether this is a compatibility problem (after the latest Win 7 and Vista updates) or if its my GPU.

Thanks for all your time and expertise.

Set your Steam offline mode, see if this is some Steam issue.

Is PSU sufficient for your rig?

Memtest.org can test your memory overnight.

Sorry if this is banal to ask, but did you apply Driver Sweeper-Guru3D when reinstalling the Catalyst versions?

cybercore said:

Set your Steam offline mode, see if this is some Steam issue.

Is PSU sufficient for your rig?

Memtest.org can test your memory overnight.

Sorry if this is banal to ask, but did you apply Driver Sweeper-Guru3D when reinstalling the Catalyst versions?

Hi!

Thanks for answering my post! After quite a bit of trial and error - I just found out that my problem was my sound card! I took it out then everything suddenly ran fine. There may have been some conflicts or maybe something in it got fried or something - not really sure. But, at least I am 99% sure now that it was that.

Although this may now be moot, but regarding the questions you posed - yes, the PSU I have is sufficient for the rig. I only heard of memtest now and it seems like a very nice diagnostic tool. Thanks for that. And regarding the drivers - yes I did apply Driver Sweeper :)

In any case - thanks again for replying.