Solved PC Freezes, no blue screen, while playing games

[SoapyCro]

I've run furmark for 15 minutes, max temp 78°C, no artifacts, no BSOD.

 

[Vir Gnarus]

The beep codes kinda worry me. Have you tried looking in your motherboard's manual on the exact beep code? All mobo manuals come with beep codes (proper name "POST code") listed.

My immediate concern was your SSD drive, since those have a relatively high ROF. You'll want to make sure that your BIOS, your motherboard chipset (especially any disk controller) drivers, and the firmware (most important) for your SSD are all up to date. All those are involved with your SSD's operation and unless they're all up-to-snuff then you'll experience issues frequently.

 

[SoapyCro]

The beep codes kinda worry me. Have you tried looking in your motherboard's manual on the exact beep code? All mobo manuals come with beep codes (proper name "POST code") listed.

My immediate concern was your SSD drive, since those have a relatively high ROF. You'll want to make sure that your BIOS, your motherboard chipset (especially any disk controller) drivers, and the firmware (most important) for your SSD are all up to date. All those are involved with your SSD's operation and unless they're all up-to-snuff then you'll experience issues frequently.

Didn't find anything useful about beep codes. It says: "Without VGA card" 5 long beeps.

SSD is not the cause! I had the exact same BSOD problem with my system installed on HDD. (I bought SSD few weeks ago and had had BSOD problem way before SSD arrived)

note: This BSOD occurs only when playing games. It has never occurred during normal work. (watching videos, using MS Office, browsing the web, programming, etc)

 

[Vir Gnarus]

If your system spontaneously said no VGA card (graphics card) available despite not having fiddled with it, then there could be some issue with the PCI-E port your graphics card is inserted into, or the card itself is going bad. Re-seat the card, checking to make sure the card's connector and the PCI-E slot are perfectly clean, and that the card itself is completely flush with the slot and is not crooked.

 

[SoapyCro]

If your system spontaneously said no VGA card (graphics card) available despite not having fiddled with it, then there could be some issue with the PCI-E port your graphics card is inserted into, or the card itself is going bad. Re-seat the card, checking to make sure the card's connector and the PCI-E slot are perfectly clean, and that the card itself is completely flush with the slot and is not crooked.

No, only after BSOD. Any other time, boots normally without beeps.

 

[SoapyCro]

Bump

 

[markom]

Hi there
Have u tried GPU temperature ?

 

[SoapyCro]

Yup. I've run Furmark for 15 minutes, max temp 78C.

 

[Vir Gnarus]

78 is kinda hitting that critical mark, albeit at the low end. There may be potential that over an extended period of high usage, the GPU is hitting critical temps and is causing the BSOD, which could explain why your system would have POST beep errors after a BSOD as it's still not properly cooled down yet. You may wanna check with HWInfo the temps for your other hardware as well. Better yet, log it for us. When you start it up, select "Sensors only" and then start a log of it (default settings). Play a game until you BSOD, then send the log to us. Getting us two logs of two separate BSOD incidents would help even more as we can compare.

As for the beep code itself, I think I misinterpreted it. You previously said it was 6 beeps, yet you mentioned 5 long beeps means no VGA as mentioned on the manual. I take it the manual does not mention the 6 beeps (short beeps I presume?) you're hearing, yes?

Regardless, you are experiencing intermittent beep codes. Therefore you have a hardware problem, there's no other way to explain it. Again, make sure to re-seat the video card and check the slot and card connector and clean them if they're dirty. As an extra measure, make sure that if there's an aux power cable connected to the video card that it's properly connected, and you may even wanna go ahead and reconnect all your other cables (drive power/data cables, PSU cables, etc.) as a just-in-case.

Outside of that, it's really hard to determine this. First thing I'd recommend, if your motherboard has onboard video, you may wanna switch to that temporarily and play games (if you can) to see if it BSODs still. If it doesn't, your video card is most to blame. As for the hardware tests themselves, you said you already completed them. For Prime95, how long did you run it, and on what settings? If Large FFTs, run it again on Blend, and if you ran it on Blend, run it on Large FFTs this time. Both tests stress different parts. Each test should be at least 8 hours.

Besides this, I'm starting to feel we're running into a wall, and the only thing left after all this would be to start swapping hardware.

 

[SoapyCro]

I'll run prime95 overnight. I'm not sure temperature is problem because sometimes I'm able to play for few hours without problem, sometimes 10 minutes, BSOD. As for beep codes, there are 5 long beeps and at the end beep I hear when PC boots normally. My board has P67 chipset which doesn't have onboard graphics.

Small edit: Since I disabled automatic restart, I have to do it manually. If I press reset button after BSOD I get beeps and have to shut pc down. But if I press power button after BSOD PC shuts down, press it again boots normally. (no beeps)

 

[Vir Gnarus]

That's because of the different manner Reset and Power buttons work in terms of power routing, which would cause those differences in response. The video card may be kept in a bad state during the reset but with complete power off it loses that corrupt state. That's just one way of looking at it.

I honestly think we got a bad video card going on here, skipper. That or a bad mobo. If you or someone you know has a spare video card sitting around, swap that in and test, or at least purchase a cheapo budget one just to test reliability of the card. If the other card works fine, your current one is most certainly bad. The POST code and the fact this only happens during gaming kinda points both fingers at the card.

 

[SoapyCro]

That's because of the different manner Reset and Power buttons work in terms of power routing, which would cause those differences in response. The video card may be kept in a bad state during the reset but with complete power off it loses that corrupt state. That's just one way of looking at it.

I honestly think we got a bad video card going on here, skipper. That or a bad mobo. If you or someone you know has a spare video card sitting around, swap that in and test, or at least purchase a cheapo budget one just to test reliability of the card. If the other card works fine, your current one is most certainly bad. The POST code and the fact this only happens during gaming kinda points both fingers at the card.

Since I'm impatient I'm running prime95 "Blend Test" now. After 30 minutes max CPU temp is 60°C and average is around 58°C.
And while playing FSX GPU temp doesn't go above 63°C (I've played it for about an hour).

Buying a cheap mobo in Croatia is just not possible. Prices are really, really high and life standard is really, really low (just for comparison at the time I bought my GPU (year and a half ago), in USA it costed around $200, I paid for it $275).

Later I'll try to switch my GPU to another PCI-E slot and see what happens.

All my components still have warranty but that's a long process here. So I want to try everything possible before taking that last step. I had one spare GPU but I gave it away few months ago.

One more thing: could this problem be related to FSX maybe? Since that's the only game I'm playing currently. I've played Battlefield 3 before. (I have around 150 hours spent in it, without any problem)

 

[Vir Gnarus]

Again, make sure that each run of Prime95 is at least 8 hours, one for Blend and one for Large FFTs.

I'm sorry to hear about the difficulty, but it should not be an insurmountable task to get a budget workstation video card to test with (I'm talking like $20-$50 US dollars here). It's unfortunate that we're dealing with hardware because that often is very difficult to ascertain properly. Try the other PCI-E slot, and then also make sure to play more than one game, preferably games with very high graphics (another option is running the free Unigine benchmark). If it ends up BSODing only on FSX (you're referring to Microsoft Flight Simulator, yes?) then we'll have to deal with other components that are specifically used for that game. Something specifically in that game would have to trigger this (if that's the case of course).

 

[SoapyCro]

Prime95 runs without erros (both Large FFTs and Blend). I've tried running Unigine Benchmark for an hour, no problems. Max GPU temp is 73°C. And I'm running HWINFO while playing FSX (yes, it is Flight Simulator X), but BSOD didn't occur for the past 2 days. (note I didn't change anything so probably problem is still here)

 

[SoapyCro]

3 days, still no BSOD.

 

[Vir Gnarus]

So switching the slot helped? That's not good at all. Either the card was actually inserted improperly at first or there was debris in the slot that caused a connection issue, all of which was resolved when you switched to a new slot, or the motherboard itself has bad slots, which means the motherboard is unreliable and should be replaced.

 

[SoapyCro]

So switching the slot helped? That's not good at all. Either the card was actually inserted improperly at first or there was debris in the slot that caused a connection issue, all of which was resolved when you switched to a new slot, or the motherboard itself has bad slots, which means the motherboard is unreliable and should be replaced.

Nope. The last thing I did was replace the Saitek drivers. I didn't do any hardware related changes.

 

[Vir Gnarus]

What Saitek device do you use? Sounds like it's something like a joystick that you would otherwise not use in BF3. That would explain why it's only crashing on that game and not the other.

 

[SoapyCro]

Pro Flight Yoke.

 

[Vir Gnarus]

That's what I figured. Installing driver updates for that happened to cure your problem?