Black Screen/ Vertical Bars Crash

[White Falcon]

About a month ago I did a semi-upgrade for my computer, I kept my old case, graphics cards, sound card, dvd drive, and at the time - hard drives, and upgraded cpu (and a cooler), ram and mobo.

About 2 weeks ago I succesfully cloned my entire setup from a set of 4 different hard drives onto the one new sata3 i bought. Functions flawlessly, wouldnt even know anythins changed apart fro ma significant boost in performance and hard drive space.

A couple days ago I was playing dirt 2 and suddenly the screen went black, the sound went distorted, alt tabbing, alt f4 , all the rest failed, and it just shut down. Since then Its happened a couple times, once or twice some vertical bars on screen but otherwise a black screen and either distorted sound or none at all. Trying to replicate the error I thought it might be gpu heat but the temps seemed fine (50c ish stable, no more than 80 in game - keeping the temp on my second screen).

I thought well its gotta be something to do with 3d or gpu stress but then I had it again just using windows media center to run a recorded tv show, Im considering now its quite possibly PSU, the reason im unsure of the brand is because i got it off a friend on my old build and worked fine for that, but maybe 600w no longer suffices for my needs.

I guess I want to identify the right problem so I know whether i need a new gpu or new psu.
Thanks

Specs should be in sig?

If you cant be bothered clicking:

i5 760 @4.00ghz
Gigabyte P55A-UD3
12gb ddr3: 2x2gb g.skill 1333 ripjaws + 2x4gb g.skill 1333 nt
Gigabyte 1gb 4870
Seagate 2tb Sata3 Green
24" BenQ G2420HD
NZXT Alpha
Creative Soundblaster x-fi xtreme audio
PSU: 'Top Silent JSP-600'
Windows 7 x64

 

[White Falcon]

Weirdly I ran Furmark for an hour, reached 99c, no crash, and then 5 minutes into dirt 2 did it.
So dirt 2 will crash it, gtaiv will crash it, windows media center will crash it, but furmark wont??

new psu time?

 

[dark2099]

what are all your volts at, and how long have you been using that install of windows?

 

[Deleted member 24505]

If furmark runs but dirt 2 does not, could it be the game and not your machine?

You tried any other games to see if they cause the same symptom?

edit just noticed you tried gtaiv too, :S Could be hardware then.

 

[White Falcon]

what are all your volts at, and how long have you been using that install of windows?

vcore 1.28
qpi/vtt 1.25
pci i auto
pll default 1.8
dram 1.64
rest of them - auto

I ran this os/folder layout etc for probably at least a year quite happily, but Ive just (about a month ago) cloned all the contents/os from 4 seperate hard drives onto the one big sata3,
weirdly I did have sessions of extended gaming after doing this and at the time it didnt provoke a crash like it does now.

------------------------

weirdly on the boot after checking this in the bios, I bluescreened on startup with a message about 'atipmdag' - 'page_fault_in_nonpaged_area'

 

[White Falcon]

i just played dirt basically straight away from my last post (11.23am) , and only JUST crashed 5 minutes ago (1.15pm), nearly 2 hours and THEN a crash. odd

 

[White Falcon]

noticed i have a svchost process using between 25-40% of my cpu the entire time, when im not even doing anything. Im wondering if this is playing a part

 

[95Viper]

Could it be a bad codec or DX file, since WMC crashes?

Your ram voltages set right?
Timings?
If you are O/Cing set it to back to normal clocks and try to see if it crashes.
All your drivers up to date?
Bios up to date?


What is the error code you get when it crashes?
Have you checked out the logs in event viewer?



Edit:

noticed i have a svchost process using between 25-40% of my cpu the entire time, when im not even doing anything. Im wondering if this is playing a part

Could be the A/V causing this or, even a virus or a mis-behaving driver...
First run a virus and malware scan.
If that, passes try turning off your A/V and see if the CPU usage drops (could be on-demand scanning)
Open Task Manager and right click on the offending SVCHost and click on Go to service(s) and see which file(s) are highlighted.

 

[White Falcon]

first of all, thanks 95viper for the detailed response

havent yet considered bad codec or dx but its a possibility.

ram is at 1.64 instead of 1.5, I went on this recommendation when I overclocked the cpu and at the the time was not experiencing these problems.

I had previously changed the timings to those listed on the ram packaging (since the bios didnt match them by default) when I was only running 4gb of ram, I experienced problems when i added the other 8gb and solved it by going to auto/default timings. So Yeah Default timings.

I was on 10.1 ati drivers when i started noticing it, i updated to 11.3, noticed worse performance (at least i thought) and still got crashes so went back to 10.1

I bought the mobo a month ago with the new upgrades but yes ive checked since and its the newest bios possible (f11?)


Im not getting an error code when it crashes, it just goes black or weird bars, sometimes distorted sound, sometimes no sound, sometimes the sound keeps going ,but i have to hard reboot.


havent checked the logs in the event viewer. tbh havent done this before, would this help?
where are they?


i run avast, within the past two weeks if i recall correctly ive done 2 full system scans just when i happened to be leaving the system going overnight for other reasons, nothing alarming at the time, may have been some stuff shoved into the 'virus chest' but no apparent issues.


Id only noticed the high idle cpu usage yesterday and was a bit confused how I could be using 40% of an i5 browsing firefox, so I closed every thing i thought might be contributing, including firefox, still the same. Checked running processed ordered by cpu usage, and one of the svchost.exe's was using between 30-36 ISH % bouncing around which is a rather big hit to performance (maybe this is why i felt like my games were performing worse with the new drivers)
I understand that there are a fair amount of these processes that run legitimately, I did a long time ago on a different machine have a virus disguise itself as an svchost though.
Im not diagnosing that same issue straight away but ending the process dropped my cpu usage and the computer kept running, true vital svchosts processes when killed would crash a computer.


When It pops up again ill try do as suggested and check it.
Thanks again (and thanks to tigger and dark2009 for the suggestions thusfar)

 

[White Falcon]

oops double post

 

[95Viper]

havent checked the logs in the event viewer. tbh havent done this before, would this help?
where are they?

Go to "Start" and click on "Run" and enter "eventvwr.msc /s" (without the quotes), click "OK" and explore...

NOTE: As far the double post goes, you can delete them.
Just click on the "edit" button , "go advanced" and there is a delete post tic there.

 

[White Falcon]

delete post button doesnt seem to be there (even ctrl f'ed for it) maybe I cant on this thread or something :S

in the summary of administrative events, under critical i have a log for source: 'kernel-power'
clicking into it gives me 22 logs, 11 of which have happened this month, and 6 among those throughout yesterday and today

'The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.'

 

[White Falcon]

my ram slots are labelled as such [2] [1] [4] [3] (left to right)
so before id added in the extra 8gb kit, i had 4gb kit in slots 1 and 3 (recommended for a 2 stick setup) and assumed that any extra sticks would be shoved in the remaining slots 2 and 4.
This wouldnt really matter had i used identical sticks for all 4 slots, but im using 2 different kits, yeah the same brand( g skill ), yeah the same mhz (1333), but different size kits and different timings. I also assumed that the channels were set out so channel 2 and 4 were channel a, and channel 1 and 3 were channel b (left to right channels taking into account the skip a slot idea)

did some reading up in my mobo manual, and turns out that the idea of using slots 1 and 3 for a kit only really applies in the two stick situation, so with the first 2 slots (2 and 1) as channel a/channel 0, and the second 2 slots as channel b/channel 1, it meant i put my 8gb kit in channel a, my 4gb kit in channel b, set my timings properly for each kit, i put my ram voltages back down to default. im HOPING thisll solve the problem but ill have to keep provoking it and find out.