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Random restarts


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I'm currently using the computer listed in my signature. My problem seems to be pretty common to custom builds so I have tried a couple solutions I found on this forum and others. Basically I'm having issues with this system randomly restarting. The restarts tend to occur under two conditions. 1. During gaming (of course!) and 2. after a cold start.

 

So right now, my computer just restarted on its own. I just plugged it in, switch on the PSU, booted up and went straight to the game. About 15 minutes later...restart. I could bet money that it WON'T do that now...since its warmed up.

 

Anyway, using the Sil controller. Tried it with two different games, both experienced similar shutdowns. My temps seem ok. Nothing over 50C ever. CPU stays at about 35C and PWMIC around 40 and Chipset around 40 (all with minimal chass fan rpms). I checked the bios settings...they are fine so its not that shutting it down. And that wouldn't be a reset anyway, right? So Im ruling heat out.

 

I turned off automatic restart in windows. ONCE it just froze for eternity and I did a hard reset on it. Ever since then...it still automically resets, even with that option off. No BSOD, nothing in event viewer no warnings or anything.

 

I ran Memtest for the third time. Twice from windows to 100% and 500% and once from the BIOS overnight to 15 passes. No errors. I did a torture test with prime95, 2 instances for dual core and no errors. I monitored my rails during that...stable as can be.

 

I'm at a loss for ideas here. Could this be driver related? When I started one game I got a wglMakeCurrent error or something along those lines. A couple sound loop crashes and this thing where the screen would blink a distorted frame and then crash (happened twice). But the majority of the crashes have been simple restarts. My video drivers are up to date, this happened with both the old and current drivers. I tried disabling the Realtek audio and it seemed to be ok...but it could have just been "warmed up" again. I don't know.

 

Not overclocked at all. All I changed in the bios was: setup Raid, enabled USB keyboard. Just looked at GPU temp and it seems ok too.

 

Any ideas? Things I can try?

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Whoa! Looks like you covered pretty much all the bases! I would take a spare hard drive and do a fresh win install! Put one game on it and start gaming just to see it windows is your problem! Good luck! Don’t like your PSU at all but this is just me! I like to use what’s recommended!

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Guest Kobalt

Well, restarts = either BSOD, or PSU issues. At least that has been my experience.

I would take one vid card out, and see what it does.

I thought the crossfire boards didn't allow SLI, so maybe it has something to do with that?

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hey, I might be shooting in the dark here, but I had similar problems with random restarts, which I eventually narrowed down to my SAMSUNG sata hard drive. I downloaded a hard drive checker utility from samsung, and found that it got erros whenever it was in a master SATA slot. Whenever it got to what appeared like a bad sector, the hard drive would lock up and stop responding. When in windows it always manifested itself as a hard lockup for about 5 seconds, no bsod, then restart. I found that moving the samsung to a slave slot on the motherboard (specifically slot 4, the top one) it really improved stability. However, I recently re-installed windows, this time using the FLOPPY disk to install the ULi drivers first. So far I have not seen any errors.

 

So maybe try a re-install of windows using the floppy to install the ULi drivers. (or for now just try moving the slot your hd is plugged into). I know this seems strange... but just try it and see if it helps.

 

Another thing you can try is make sure that in the windows device manager it lists everything properly, like listing the ULi in the SCSI/RAID tab.

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  • 4 weeks later...

After contacting EVGA about the problem I was told the card was defective. I then returned it...only to find it was on backorder and not in stock. So I went with a different card...ATI X1800XT. Installed it yesterday and gamed for many many happy hours.

 

Then this morning, cold boot. Less then 30 minutes into it (in a game environment of course) same freezes I seemed to get with the 7900GT.

 

Im going to play around with it, different PCIe slot, different power cable. But other then shelling out more money for another PSU, any suggestions would be nice.

 

Its not that bad having to reset after "forcing" a crash...I've gotten into the routine. Just extremely annoying...and I almost wish I had kept the 7900GT if it wasnt the problem.

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Hi everyone, just an update in case anyone else is having similar issues. I bought a OCZ 700 (the one recommended on this forum) and installed it. The computer still did the freeze/restart in less then 15 minutes. I think tried some remarkable simple, so simple I should have tried it a long time ago. I moved my video card to the other PCI-E slot. And (just did it hours ago) it's running just fine, no reboot after 33 minutes from cold boot. Granted I only gave it about 2 and 1/2 hours to cool down. So we will see in the morning how it runs.

 

The question then becomes, is there something I can do to make this PCI-E slot useful? If I were to setup a crossfire system, would I run into the same problems? Perhaps its something I needed to tweak in the BIOS. Any thoughts?

 

This PSU is great, even though it didn't solve the problem. It seems quieter, cooler and just nicer. 12.1 on +12v. Out of 5 PSU's never had one over before.

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All my voltages should be at defaults as I haven't set up any overclocking yet (and won't until this thing is resolved).

 

A little update. I ran memtest again from the BIOS for about an hour after a cold boot. Then used the computer for the entire day with no freeze after 15-30 minutes of "on time" that it normally takes for a freeze/reboot.

 

I tried putting the computer in Hibernate. And oddly enough even from the cold boot into Hibernate I DID NOT get the same issues as a regular start.

 

To top that off just now it froze on me again. I turned it on this morning from Hiberate and it has since been on for about 14 hours. This freeze could be unrelated, could just be a rare burp in the system since its not a regular issue...yet.

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