ASRock Extreme3 990Fx Crashing Issues

[Satvik]

Hey all,

I've been having some peculiar issues with my current system. During gameplay of any Steam game, or games like Planetside 2 and Hawken, I freeze and the crash. A static noise comes from my speakers, and if I was in a Skype call, those in the all hear it as well. Afterwards, if I'm choose to open a browser, or even open Steam, the page is very glitchy, with static-ish pixels appearing on the screen. It's unresponsive.

The strange thing is that I've swapped my Galaxy GTX 560 Ti BF3 Edition card with an old GTS 450 by EVGA in there, and the same thing has happened! I've tried 310.70 Beta/WHQL, 306.97, and 306.23 for drivers, but to no avail. I've narrowed this down to some other software issue, or a motherboard issue. Before I RMA through Amazon to ASRock, I'd like to see every possible solution possible.

Help?

PC Specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 965BE Deneb @ 3.5Ghz,

ASRock Extreme3 990FX Motherboard

Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4) LP Memory @ 1600Mhz

Kingwin Lazer 1000W PSU

[drdeathx]

Try without your speakers and use a headset and see if the problem persists. If so, build it out of the box to eliminate any grounding issues.

[Satvik]

I've tried without using the speakers, and instead put my headset into the 3.5mm jack on the IO panel in the back, but that didn't work; it crashed horrifically again. It's not temps or anything, since my 560 Ti and GTS 450 don't go above 54C, which is safe I believe.

I looked at Event Viewer at the time of the crash. I tried Saint's Row 3, since that crashes for me faster than Planetside 2 or Skyrim. Apparently, nvlddmkm display driver stopped responding and recovered. I'm not sure how to proceed from there.

As for building outside of the box, would placing the mobo on the cardboard case it came in work okay? I've never done this before, so your advice would be helpful.

[natr0n]

Try a fan blowing on the northbridge. They tend to run hot and go unnoticed.

[Satvik]

I'll see how to do that. I have an NZXT Swtich 810 housing everybody, so there isn't a terrific way of not modding the case. I'll look into that because I know that there are those fans you can mount onto the heatsinks. Thanks.

[Aquinus]

Running DDR3-1600 on the 965BE is considered an overclock. Maybe your memory is unstable? I would try either dropping the memory speed to 1333Mhz or bumping the CPU/NB voltage to see if either of those make a difference. I would also stop overclocking until you figure it out.

[Norton]

Originally Posted by Aquinus

Running DDR3-1600 on the 965BE is considered an overclock. Maybe your memory is unstable? I would try either dropping the memory speed to 1333Mhz or bumping the CPU/NB voltage to see if either of those make a difference. I would also stop overclocking until you figure it out.

+1

Also, running 4 sticks of memory can put a lot of load on the chips memory controller. Try running 2 sticks of memory @1333 and see if the crashes continue.

[Satvik]

Thanks! I reset the 965BE to default settings and clock speeds, and I noticed that my RAM was on an XMP profile, but the frequency was @ 800, so I took it off of that profile, and set it to 1333. I'll see how it plays out; I'll probably run memtest later to see if the problems were because of RAM.

[Satvik]

Thank you thank you.

I followed the advice given, and as it turns out, the RAM speeds were the culprits here. I set them to 1333 Mhz, and I'm enjoying great sessions of 3hrs + on all of my games. Thank you all for you help!

-Satvik