Persistent problems with my PC

[Hibernian]

Ok, I have a PC Specialist desktop PC that I bought about 2 years ago. I have had a few minor problems with it this year (see these threads I made: Getting error message after power outage, Getting "Blue screen of Death"), but those mostly just went away by themselves and haven't been much of an issue. But over the last month or so I've had lots of different problems cropping up.

Here's my technical specs (taken from my order form on this website):

Case COOLERMASTER HAF 922 MID TOWER GAMING CASE
Overclocked CPU Overclocked Intel® Core™i7-3770k Quad Core (3.50GHz @ max 4.60GHz)

OC Settings:
AI Overclock Tuner: XMP
BLCK Freq: 100
Turbo Ratio: By All Cores
By All Cores: 46
Internal PLL OverVoltage: Auto
Mem Freq: 1600
EPU Power Saving: Disabled
Load-Line Calibration: Auto
CPU Manual Voltage: 1.375
DRAM Voltage: 1.65
CPU Spread Spectrum: Disabled
CPU Ratio: Auto
CPU C1E: Disabled

Motherboard ASUS® P8Z77-V PRO/THUNDERBOLT: PCI-E 3.0 READY, WIFI, SLI, X-FIRE
Memory (RAM) 16GB KINGSTON HYPERX GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 2133MHz X.M.P (4 x 4GB KIT)
Graphics Card 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 680 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready
Memory - 1st Hard Disk 480GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk 2TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD2002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 12x BLU-RAY RE-WRITER DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW
Memory Card Reader INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply CORSAIR 850W PRO SERIES™ HX850-80 PLUS® GOLD MODULAR
Processor Cooling Corsair H100 Hydro Series High Performance CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card ASUS Xonar DS - Bring Hi-Fi spirit to your Music, Movie & Games
Wireless/Wired Networking 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
USB Options 6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD

Warranty 3 Year Gold Warranty (2 Year Collect & Return, 2 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)


So, several games that I've been playing have started randomly crashing, at first I thought this might have been caused by the recent new Nvidia drivers that I downloaded a about a month ago, but I have now reverted back to the older drivers, and I'm still getting crashes and all sorts of other weird stuff. So some of the games that are acting weird are; Arma 3, which is currently unplayable for me because it just crashes after a few minutes of playing, it will either just crash to desktop without giving me any error message, or it will freeze up the whole PC completely and I have to force it shut down by pressing the power button. Then there's MechWarrior Online, which just consistently crashes to desktop at random times. And last night I was playing Crusader Kings II (not a particularly graphically demanding game) and it keeps crashing now about once per hour (it does give an error message, though I don't know if it would be any use to post it here).

Even Windows Media Player failed yesterday, I was playing some music in the background and the program just closed without any message, I started it up again and it played ok for a while, but then it stopped and gave an error saying that the sounds device had failed or was not present (or something like that). It came back to normal after I restarted the PC, but nothing like that has ever happened before, so I'm starting to think that all these problems are connected.

Today I got a really bad error message, I think it's the infamous Blue Screen of Death. The computer just totally crashed as I was playing Crusader Kings II and went to this screen (it was up for about 10 seconds so I managed to take a picture of it with my phone):



When I restarted I got some more errors and some of the normal programs wouldn't work (like the mouse software and audio panel). Though it's ok now that I've restarted again.
I did get this blue screen of death crash about twice before in this last month, but I was never able to read what it said or take a picture before. So clearly from that error it seems to be something wrong with the processor(s) and possibly the Overclocking.

I don't know what I can really do to fix these problems (or even diagnose them properly), but if anyone has any ideas please do suggest.

 

[ubuysa]

That is the Windows 7 Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) but the BCCode (the stop code) of 0x00000101 is a VERY unusual one. It's a Clock Watchdog Timeout error, basically this means the CPU failed to respond to an interrupt in a specified time. So...what to do?

Given that BCCode and your description of lots of weird things happening I would suggest that the first thing you should do is to turn off all the overclocking and see whether things settle down. If they do, and I rather suspect they will, then you'll need to be a tad less aggressive with the overclocking.

 

[sasrob34]

I would talk to PC Specialist be for trying anything you'r self. One simple thing you could try is resetting bios to optimal default settings. After two years on a gaming pc that have been overclocked it could just be overheating and shutting down. May need new thermal paste and a good clean out.

 

[Hibernian]

Thanks for responding guys.

That is the Windows 7 Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) but the BCCode (the stop code) of 0x00000101 is a VERY unusual one. It's a Clock Watchdog Timeout error, basically this means the CPU failed to respond to an interrupt in a specified time. So...what to do?

Given that BCCode and your description of lots of weird things happening I would suggest that the first thing you should do is to turn off all the overclocking and see whether things settle down. If they do, and I rather suspect they will, then you'll need to be a tad less aggressive with the overclocking.

I should specify that I did not setup the overclocking on the machine, PC Specialist did that (because I ordered it pre-overclocked). So I don't really know much about how overclocking actually works, or how to change the settings. I know that by pressing F2 on start-up I can access the BIOS menu that the PC has called the ASUS UEFI BIOS Utility, but it has a huge number of setting and I have never messed around with it. Is that where I would change the overclocking settings?

Here's a photo I just took of that screen (it's a little blurry because of being on a phone, but I think you can get the idea):


The general menu offers three settings, "Power Saving", "Normal" and "ASUS Optimal". It was set to the highest "ASUS Optimal", but I have now changed it to "Normal", to see if that has any effect.

But is this the same as "turning off overclocking"?

I would talk to PC Specialist be for trying anything you'r self. One simple thing you could try is resetting bios to optimal default settings.

Ok, how do I talk to PC Specialist? You mean do so via this forum? or call them up, or Email them?

How would I reset the BIOS to the "default settings"?

After two years on a gaming pc that have been overclocked it could just be overheating and shutting down. May need new thermal paste and a good clean out.

Hmm, well I doubt that my issues are being caused purely by overheating. I used to have a computer that overheated, but this one is not really like that, it doesn't feel like the same kind of thing. I have the Core Temp program for the CPU and a separate dashboard thing for the GPU temperature, so I generally know who hot the components are running.

Here's the readout of the Processors after playing a few minutes on ARMA 3 (high settings):


The Max temp is only 70 to 75 C, and I don't think that's that bad is it? (I have seen it go higher on some games, but never over 90 C and I think it's programmed to auto-shutdown if it ever goes above 100, which it never has). The GPU has similar temperatures. Although the CPUs definitely used to run cooler when idle when I first got the PC (used to be between 25 and 35, now it's like 35 to 40, or even 45).

About cleaning. I clean the dust out of the inside about every 6 months or so (last time I did it about 2 months ago). Dust certainly does accumulate on the fans and the watercooler component (the sort of metal grid thing which, I assume, radiates heat away) and the temperatures do always go down a bit after I clean it. I have no idea about thermal paste, as that was applied by PC Specialist and I wouldn't even know how to start doing that (it requires basically stripping most of the components out to get to that area, no?).

 

[ubuysa]

I'm not an overclocking expert and if you're not sure how to turn it of call (i.e. phone) PCS and ask for some help. Generally with the sort of problems you describe turning off overclocking is always the best first thing to try.

 

[mantadog]

Overclocking issues are not always related to heat, so I'd still point the finger at the overclock.

You will need to go into the 'advanced' bios, and find something that talks about CPU multipliers/voltage and see if it has a reset to default button. If you are at all unsure then just give PCS a call and they will talk you through it on the phone.

 

[Hibernian]

I don't want to say too soon, but I think that change of BIOS settings to "Normal" might have done some good, because I played games for several hours last night and didn't get any crashes. Though I'll have to see how things go today and in the next few days (there have been other times when it didn't crash for a long time, and then just started doing it again). So I'll have to still monitor things because it could easily happen again.

Anyway, I'll try to give PCS a ring tomorrow. I'll tell you how it goes.

 

[Hibernian]

Just a quick update on this. I never got a chance to ring PCS, but that change of the BIOS setting completely fixed all the problems and I haven't had any crashing since then. So thanks for suggesting that anyway guys.

 

[ubuysa]

Just a quick update on this. I never got a chance to ring PCS, but that change of the BIOS setting completely fixed all the problems and I haven't had any crashing since then. So thanks for suggesting that anyway guys.

That's good news but it's not quite the end of the story because you now (probably) are not overclocking at all, so you might encounter performance issues in some games? If you're happy with the performance then leave things as they are but it's probable that you can overclock but with slightly less aggressive settings.

I would suggest that you call PCS, tell them about the issues you've been having, tell them that turning off overclocking stops the issues and ask them how you can determine the best overclock settings for your rig.