Hey all, I've come here and found this great forum with a hope that someone can help me figure out my issue. I have a computer that's about 2 years old now. It has a EVGA board, 2 SLI GTX280 cards, 8gig Ram, Yorkfield Quad core 2.66 cpu, and I'm running XP64. Back when I first was building it and turning it on I had some issues with EVGA board and nvidia networking but fixed those..then I had some issue with sound that was fixed when I used Realtek HD audio drivers (sugguested by EVGA). I've been able to use it pretty well without any crashes since then until recently. Now it's been crashing a lot especially when there is a load put on it by a game or converting video files etc. I don't know if the sound issue is back or if it's something else. I've ran virus scans etc already.

I read on this forum that I should maybe try OCCT test and I ran that... the first time it told my video drivers were out of date but still ran the test. It made it about 10secs into test before my comp crashed to BSOD. I updated drivers and tried again and it seemed to do fine but I don't know if issue is gone.

I have attached the last 7 minidumps and a copy of my dxdiag txt. Any help would be awesome as I feel like the computer is still unstable.


Again, Thankyou for any help at all with this!! =)

Hi and welcome to TSF,

Can you please also let me know about make/model of your PSU ? I will have a look at your dumps asap (I am at work right now) and will get back to you with the results. Regards

Sure, PSU is a Tagan BZ series 1100 watt

Thanks a ton!

All of these dumps cite hal.dll along with other OS processes with Error 0x9C,
MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION (9c). "A fatal Machine Check Exception has occurred".

Machine check exceptions are frequently caused by one of the following conditions:

- Overclocking CPU/RAM/GPU etc.
- PSU is overstressed or failing
- Thermal conditions e.g. failure of cooling / fans etc.
- Failing memory / motherboard / CPU etc.

Considering the system specs, I would start with PSU .....

Try running your system with minimum hardware, i.e. one graphic card, one stick of RAM, one HDD (with the OS) and see how things pan out.

Thankyou for the help! I will do that tonight and let you know. If it's the PSU what brand and how much watts should I have for this build?

I have never over clocked this computer so those should be EVGA standard settings in BIOS and I just checked to make sure.

Another question sorry.. if I get occasional black screen from cold boot but never from a warm boot would that suggest the PSU also? That happens a lot. I would just assume that if warm boots have been flawless it's not ram. I did run memtest and used occt to test ram with at least 10 passes with no issues on ram. I did a 30 min test of the PSU without any issues as well though. GPU was fine too, so I don't know if that rules anything out or proves it's something over the other but just thought I'd add it. Maybe the motherboard? I had an ASUS with major voltage issues on the Board and it acted way worse than this though...

I'm rambling..thanks again !!

Do you hear any beeps when you get stuck at black screen?

Probably it may be an motherboard issue (if there is no beep).

I do hear the normal 1 beep startup but it never has monitor turn on or keyboard/mouse.

Have you tried to boot the system with minimum required hardware as I suggested in post # 4 (i.e. one stick of RAM, only bootable HDD, graphics card, kb/mouse)? If so how the system behaves ?

I have been working on the road and will be home tonight, thankyou for the help again, I will try the single card/hdd/ram tonight and see how it behaves

No problem, just keep us updated about your progress.

i bought a corsair ax1200w psu and installed it after occt showed the old one was failing. I've tried it with 1 of each and now with everything re-hooked up, so far no problems!! =)

Thankyou so much for the help again and I'll post up if it somehow goes down again but it seems to be fine.

Been working perfectly still, thankyou for all the help Archean!