xcylent
Posts: 230 +17
Hi all! Boy, haven't posted on here in quite some time
Anyway, I have run into some problems with a PC which have defeated my realm of knowledge, so I ask any of you friendly folk if you may be able to lend a hand (or an ear!) to help me tackle this problem.
A little background: This is concerning my brother's PC. He owned a Dell XPS 8100, then asked me to build him a new PC. I obliged, and went ahead. Here are the specs:
CPU: AMD FX-8320
CPU cooler: Coolermaster Hyper tx3 evo
Motherboard: ASrock 970 extreme 4
RAM: 8GB of generic ram he had from a while back. (SIDENOTE: I swapped the RAM later for reasons that will be addressed further down)
HDD: 2tb storage and 1tb boot
Windows 8
450W Antec PSU
Anyway, the PC came to life just fine and worked flawlessly through installing programs/running applications/streaming media. However after a few days, problems began. e.g. he's just listening to music and chatting on skype, everything freezes. Music continues to play but mouse/keyboard unresponsive, nothing happening on screen. I had a suspicion that it was the CPU overheating, so I reseated the CPU cooler, with re-applied thermal paste, then monitored the temps - they were fine! So then my next guess was that the RAM was the culprit. So in a slight act of desperation, I pulled my RAM from my personal PC (also home built by me, the RAM is Patriot G2 8GB (2x4gb) 1333MHz) and put it in his system. Booted just fine, and everything looked ok. Another interesting sidenote, I placed his old RAM (which he had reused from the XPS 8100) into my system and 3 months later its running fine. I also got him to run windows memory diagnostic, and it found no errors. So anyway with the new RAM in for a week or so, his PC seemed to be running fine. Wrong. after another short period of time, he started complaining about random system stutters, lockups, and so on. accompanying these little noodles was a strange noise!
HERE ARE SOME VISUAL/AURAL REPRESENTATIONS:
I took a video of the noise (ignore the commentary, in a stupid moment I exclaimed "oh it's coil whine" but I'm not sure why I said that). Please note I did check all the fans, they're not the culprits - hence why I automatically assumed coil whine. VIDEO: PLEASE TAKE HEED OF THE AUDIO:
After a little more examination, I came across a small scratch just above the CPU fan, as you can see here: http://imgur.com/H7TUpAz,FOw6ypT#1
Don't know if that has anything to do with it.
Anyway, that's all I got. Random freezing/lockups/crashing. Both my brother and I are flummoxed.I'm sortof at my wits end here, and any input would be incredibly appreciated!
Anyway, I have run into some problems with a PC which have defeated my realm of knowledge, so I ask any of you friendly folk if you may be able to lend a hand (or an ear!) to help me tackle this problem.
A little background: This is concerning my brother's PC. He owned a Dell XPS 8100, then asked me to build him a new PC. I obliged, and went ahead. Here are the specs:
CPU: AMD FX-8320
CPU cooler: Coolermaster Hyper tx3 evo
Motherboard: ASrock 970 extreme 4
RAM: 8GB of generic ram he had from a while back. (SIDENOTE: I swapped the RAM later for reasons that will be addressed further down)
HDD: 2tb storage and 1tb boot
Windows 8
450W Antec PSU
Anyway, the PC came to life just fine and worked flawlessly through installing programs/running applications/streaming media. However after a few days, problems began. e.g. he's just listening to music and chatting on skype, everything freezes. Music continues to play but mouse/keyboard unresponsive, nothing happening on screen. I had a suspicion that it was the CPU overheating, so I reseated the CPU cooler, with re-applied thermal paste, then monitored the temps - they were fine! So then my next guess was that the RAM was the culprit. So in a slight act of desperation, I pulled my RAM from my personal PC (also home built by me, the RAM is Patriot G2 8GB (2x4gb) 1333MHz) and put it in his system. Booted just fine, and everything looked ok. Another interesting sidenote, I placed his old RAM (which he had reused from the XPS 8100) into my system and 3 months later its running fine. I also got him to run windows memory diagnostic, and it found no errors. So anyway with the new RAM in for a week or so, his PC seemed to be running fine. Wrong. after another short period of time, he started complaining about random system stutters, lockups, and so on. accompanying these little noodles was a strange noise!
HERE ARE SOME VISUAL/AURAL REPRESENTATIONS:
I took a video of the noise (ignore the commentary, in a stupid moment I exclaimed "oh it's coil whine" but I'm not sure why I said that). Please note I did check all the fans, they're not the culprits - hence why I automatically assumed coil whine. VIDEO: PLEASE TAKE HEED OF THE AUDIO:
After a little more examination, I came across a small scratch just above the CPU fan, as you can see here: http://imgur.com/H7TUpAz,FOw6ypT#1
Don't know if that has anything to do with it.
Anyway, that's all I got. Random freezing/lockups/crashing. Both my brother and I are flummoxed.I'm sortof at my wits end here, and any input would be incredibly appreciated!