Computer freezes, but no BSOD - driver issue or PSU?

[ndallen09]

Hi,

I recently acquired a logitech g930 headset, long story short I needed to update a whole heap of drivers to get it working.

Now I'm getting freezes during minimal use. (usually web browsing) The screen locks up, the mouse does not move, the numlock key doesn't respond - a hard freeze, as it were.

Interestingly, the freeze will not occur during heavy use, such as a stress test or gaming.

So far, I've tried updating all my drivers and bios, to no avail. Uninstalling the G930 drivers made no difference either, which leads me to suspect that there's something else that's causing these freezes.

Having a look at my speedfan logs, I can see that overheating is certainly not a problem. Letting Memtest86 run for a few passes shows nothing wrong with the RAM. I've disabled windows power management, I've run the driver verifier (just the windows one), I've run CHKDSK on both of the two sata hdd, reset my page file, I've dusted, cleaned, reset, re-polished, re-seated, and have just about lost my sanity.....

The only discrepancy I can see if from my voltage readings:

my +12v is only showing 11.35V (occasionally drops to 11.25V) from speedfan, and roughly the same from the BIOS (I've not yet checked it with a multimeter).

Does this look suspicious? the PSU was a good one (well, it was heavy, my usual test for a good PSU) when I got it (665W), but that was a good 4 years ago - not sure how capacitor aging has affected it but I require about 460W to run my system properly.

Alternatively, I could be jumping at straws and missing a driver issue.

Could someone suggest some next steps to take?

Cheers,

Windows 7 64bit SP1
i5 760 2.8GHz
8gb ddr3 1333mhz ram (Kingston)
665w PSU (Widetech ) - Suspicious brand perhaps? This is the top of their line.
nVidea GeForce GTS 450

 

[Tmagic650]

"my +12v is only showing 11.35V (occasionally drops to 11.25V) from speedfan"...
Sometimes these readings are less than accurate, but in this case, I would try another quality power supply

 

[ndallen09]

Thanks Tmagic!

Since that post, I've been blessed with two BSOD screens - A machine_check_exception and a clock_interrupt_was_not_received_on_a_secondary_processor. Now I can start to narrow things down!

The machine check suggests the PSU problem, since it's generic and I can think of no other possible - The clock interrupt could be the GPU, both combined suggests that either multiple components are failing on this rig..... or the power supply is not providing enough watts, amps, or magical gremlins that keep the whole thing running.

I'll get another power supply, test, and post results.

 

[ndallen09]

For the benefit of anyone stumbling across this in google with a similar issue, here are my test results:

Replacing the PSU with an identical model made no difference to the error, but replacing the PSU with greater amps on the 12V rail was more successful - the error does not seem to replicate.

Borrowing a micrometer and plugging the old PSU into my test rig at work revealed that there was not enough power being supplied to the USB outlets to power the USB transmitter for the Logitech G930 - resulting in the mixed bag of errors coming through....


tl;dr

Update your drivers, make sure that your PSU has not only the wattage but the amps on the 12v rail to power your rig.

 

[Tmagic650]

Well thanks for the update
"Borrowing a micrometer and plugging the old PSU"...
A micrometer is used for measuring small mechanical tolerances. A multimeter like my Fluke 79III True RMS multimeter, measures voltage, current and resistance, plus capacitance

 

[ndallen09]

A micrometer is used for measuring small mechanical tolerances.

That'll teach me for typing quickly! Yes - I do mean a multimeter.

I'm now going to spend the rest of the day thinking up possible applications for a micrometer in computing terms.... keystroke variance?