PC locking up

quarryman

Its a new PC I built at the weekend, so fresh windows 7 etc.

I was playing some civ 5 earlier when it locked up, but not completely, everything just went REAAAAAALLLY slow. I got task manager open (tool about 3 minutes if waiting) and nothing seems to be strangling the CPU. I have hwmonitor to watch the temps and everything is nice and cool.

I can move the mouse but everything else seems to take a minute or 2 to respond. I'm about to hard reset now and will check the event logs, any ideas?

It's done it the last 2 times within 10 mins of a restart.

yoyo

What graphics card is in the machine? sounds to be that the locking up is just the game slowing the machine down due to a crappy videocard/onboard video

Nick

EditL: I notice you built it yourself so probably put a decent GPU in it, I misread built for bought :P. Try video card driver updates, updating Civ 5 (patching it) etc

quarryman

Thanks for the reply, yeah I should have listed my hardware:

i5 2500k
GTX 560Ti
SSD HDD

I grabbed the latest drivers from the Nvidia site.

It also happened outside of the game too. I rebooted after the last crash and it locked up when I was just surfing the internet.

Very strange.

yoyo

quarryman wrote: »

Thanks for the reply, yeah I should have listed my hardware:

i5 2500k
GTX 560Ti
SSD HDD

I grabbed the latest drivers from the Nvidia site.

It also happened outside of the game too. I rebooted after the last crash and it locked up when I was just surfing the internet.

Very strange.

What power supply have you got? If you are sure the CPU/GPU temps are all ok then the freezing could be the power supply, either isnt up to the job or is poor quality/faulty, the symptoms don't sounds like faulty memory/hd, though one to diagnose! You dont get any blue screens/reboots after it starts freezing?
I would check the CPU heat sink is on securely aswell jic, also when putting on the thermal paste you didnt load it on? Over doing the paste can have negative effects

Nick

quarryman

yoyo wrote: »

What power supply have you got? If you are sure the CPU/GPU temps are all ok then the freezing could be the power supply, either isnt up to the job or is poor quality/faulty, the symptoms don't sounds like faulty memory/hd, though one to diagnose! You dont get any blue screens/reboots after it starts freezing?
I would check the CPU heat sink is on securely aswell jic, also when putting on the thermal paste you didnt load it on? Over doing the paste can have negative effects

Nick

No blue screens and nothing in the Event log to indicate what is causing the lock up before I end up having to do a reset.

Yeah my list of suspects are:

SSD
Drivers
PSU Antec 520W (not a cheap model)

in that order.

However, since the problem happened when the system was idling I'm less suspicious about a lack of power.

To rule out the SSD I've re-installed Windows and CIV to my SATA HDD and going to try reproduce the problem.

If the issue was the PSU surely the computer would just give a hard lockup though where I couldn't alt-tab or anything rather that the soft lock up I seem to be getting?

yoyo

quarryman wrote: »

Yeah my list of suspects are:

SSD
Drivers
PSU

in that order.

However, since the problem happened when the system was idling I'm less suspicious about a lack of power.

To rule out the SSD I've re-installed Windows and CIV to my SATA HDD and going to try reproduce the problem.

If the issue was the PSU surely the computer would just give a hard lockup though where I couldn't alt-tab or anything rather that the soft lock up I seem to be getting?

PSU problems can be weird though, as you say it could be the SSD, not familiar with those drives so not sure what diagnostic tools that should be used with them but it would be certainly worth a scan all the same. But what your doing now should be good confirming faulty hd or something else
Edit: Just saw your edit there, that PSU should be more than enough to power that system, I did have to RMA a Antec PSU before, but it just never powered on :P

Nick

quarryman

Just spotted that I never updated this thread.

I had put the SSD away on the assumption I'd need to RMA it at some point. Decided to see if there was a firmware update and there was. Updated the F/W for one final shot and it's been ROCK solid ever since.