Desparately need help... crash with constant high pitched tone

[AntiMoronic]

I've seen quite a few threads from searching google but the people have never posted the solution. I don't believe this is the 'squeal of death' and it only occurs on select games.

Namely:

Crysis
World In Conflict
Borderlands
Defense Grid: The Awakening

Now the first two are system intensive but the last is not in any way system intensive. I could probably run 3 versions of this game. AND I can play fallout 3 on high settings and i've not experienced a single crash even after playing for 6 hours +

Crysis crashes within 10 minutes, every time without fail. Even after leaving my computer overnight.

On that, does anybody else have any suggestions?

My gpu under load is 80c but I played like that for 4 hours before on another game (i have the logs of the fpu) and not 1 crash. Yet I play crysis which usually steadies 75c and it crashes within 5 minutes.

What I'm hoping for is somebody who has had this exact issue and found a fix, or somekind of compatibility settings I can test, or a diagnostics program which will save a log of everything every second, like temps and voltage, usage etc.

ANY help is greatly greatly appreciated.

 

[Route44]

Have you opened your case to try and ascertain where the high pitched tone is coming from?

You make it sound like it is constant. Do you get these issue at any other time? What are your graphic card temperature parameters per manufacturer?

80C = 176F

 

[AntiMoronic]

Sorry, to clarify, the tone is coming from the speakers only. No noise from the actual hardware, and everything sounds exactly the same in my case.- no indications of anything powering down etc.

I just reseated my graphics card and swapped my ram about. Again, same thing.

I have 2gb ram and ran memtest with no errors from system start up.

Though memtest won't let me allocate more than 1195mb of ram and says:

"your version of windows limits the amount of contiguous ram a single program can allocate"

I may have noticed crysis going above this, and I definitely noticed it used 1,1gb at least during one session. Yet memtest will use 1,3gb and shows up in my mem usage column.

 

[Route44]

Are you using onboard audio or do you have a dedicated PCI audio card?

 

[AntiMoronic]

Hi, I have an SB Live 5.1 PCI Card. Don't even think they support it any more.

On board sound is VIA High Definition Audio.

It does the same even when I disable sbi live, and remove the pci card. In fact, I got te pci card *after* these crashes hoping it would resolve it.

I have win xp. I've tried all options in the hardware acceleration and sample rate conversion quality, same thing.

Interesting though -- I can't produce this crash on the desktop no matter what, as in I have to be running one of these games which crashes.

I have used FurMark with THREE instances of memtest86 running all on different cores (I have quad) - vram was only 160 (crysis goes up to 340 for me), everything else was using far far more than crysis and I let that run for at least 40 min.

Gpu temp went to about 85, crysis pushes it to 67 max when in windowed mode.
cpu usage was on 75%, crysis hovers between 20 and 50
pagefile was on 1.9gb, crysis pushes it to 1.2gb max

Basically, I was using far more doing these stress tests than crysis was using when I play. I kept it in windowed mode so I could monitor temps and usage but nothing....then CRASH...every time, without fail.

Not always the same spot, seems to take longer sometimes.

Constant high pitched tone coming out of the speakers, computer completely locked up. Have to do a hard reset.

Any ideas?

I'm assuming I've ruled out a power supply issue as I've pushed both the cpu and gpu at the same time and they seem to have well enough power.

I actually bought a better psu a long time ago to test and it didn't resolve it, so I sent it back.

What else could it be?

 

[AntiMoronic]

Just updated all drivers, and fully removed display drivers, and reinstalled from absolute scratch...didn't solve a thing.

Are you seriously telling me nobody is going to message that person above who had the same issue but apparently doesn't any more?

 

[cdromce]

you might try running the software with the speakers pluged in to the onboard sound to see if it is card related

 

[AntiMoronic]

I'd tried that, still crashed but no sound. The tone was only coming out of the pci soundcard.

I got a new psu (corsair 750w, single 62a rail), still did it.
I bought a zelman gpu cooler (45c under load), still did it.
I installed windows 7 64 bit, still did it.
I bough a new motherboard and ram (gigabyte p45 and corsair 4gb ram), FIXED IT.

Although I don't know if it were the ram or the motherboard, I'm guessing the ram.