I built a new PC around a month ago and pretty much had it up and running in a few hours with no problems, which surprised me.

Anyway, over the last few days, my PC has frozen up completely at times: For example, I am watching a movie when all of a sudden everything freezes and all I can hear is the sound stuck like a machine gun firing. It's happened two other times, once when gaming (Call of Duty 4) and another time when I was watching a movie.

Thus far it has not happened outside of movies/gaming.

Another thing that may be worth mentioning is my HDD. It's the one part of my rig that is not new, I brought it over from my old PC, but I did format it. The other day when booting up, I got a disk boot/read error on startup. It doesn't seem like that could be causing the crashes though.

Hopefully someone can shed some light as to what the problem could be.

Windows Xp Pro SP3
Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P
4gb of RAM
AMD Phenom II x4 955
ATI Radeon HD 4890 1gb

With data transfer occurring all the time in a pc back and forth to the HDD then I'll lay good money that it's on it's way out Vamp with that error.

Without that error I may have gone for a heatsink and/or fan issue.

Others may have other opinions though.

Hi

I'll be happy if you find the cause, as a few years back I had the same symptoms...with Windows XP, ATI Radeon 9800GT, an Athlon XP@3000+, and an (abused) Maxtor HDD.

Was the "machine gun noise" that reminded me of it all..


You don't have any Logitech WebCam, do you?

Hi,

I don't have any webcams.

The fact that it only seems to happen during movies and games makes me think of a heat issue, but Speedfan reports acceptable temperatures. This never happened when playing GTAIV, a game that really would have pushed my system.

I'll see what happenes tonight when I watch a movie.

Hi there.

I've been monitoring all sorts of things to try and figure this one out.

For starters, opened my rig and cleaned it up, which really wasn't neccessary. I then made sure all the fans were working including the PSU fan, which they were.

Next I got SpeedFan and Sensor Pro to monitor temperatures etc.

If we haven't ruled heat out yet, then I think we certainly can with the fact that my PC froze not 10 minutes into a game. Upon reboot I played the same game for over an hour with no issues.

I took a screenshot which I'd like some opinions on:



1. Why is my processor showing as 800Mhz in the System Properties?
2. CPU fan listed as 120RPM? I ran Speedfan at the same time and it said it was 9000RPM.
3. Temperatures? Why the sudden rise in CPU and AUX temps? And then the sudden DROP in the sys temp? Perhaps this program is not very good?

Are you running sensor pro and speed fan at the same time? If so, that could be the problem there. I get something similar when running speed fan and ASUS pc probe II at the same time.

That's an interesting graphics card...

@ Vamp, it's most likely running @ 800Mhz in that pic because of AMD's Cool N' Quiet feature. It's supposed to be a feature that downclocks your CPU when you're not using it much to save energy.

Give this program a try CPUID, and see what it tells you.