My 2011 Build - Freezing upon Win7 load

[Smokey Deza]

Just curious as to how much life is left 9 years on and when I can expect it to truly beat the dust

So like a lot of people back then I bought the trusty i5 2500k along with a Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 motherboard (some favoured budget model) and its been clocked at an average 4.6Ghz since it was built. Only really had one serious problem over the years and that was the O\S SSD failing.

But the last year or so, on the rare occasion in Win7 it'd just freeze, or the screen goes blank and resets shortly after. But over time this has become more frequent and has gone from a nuisance to a concern. Concerning as sometimes the monitor had no signal after rebooting but, shutting down for a few minutes fixed it. When this stopped working I swapped the DVI connector to another port on my GPU.

Last weekend though it'd frozen several times already, but one time upon rebooting it insta-froze upon loading Windows. Second time same thing but the screen goes blank. Third reboot was ok, only to return 10 minutes later and it'd frozen again. This time it was BSOD.

Upon troubleshooting.

Safe-mode was fine.
Installed windows on another partition - Froze
Tried my previous GPU and couldn't get a signal for some reason.
Put my R9 380x back in but tried the other slot. Much to my surprise this cured the problem, or provided a workaround at least.

It did actually suffer one freeze shortly afterwards, but just one and nothing since then. I don't recall any freezing or blank screens in games, and has always been when watching stuff or on some webpage etc.

Does it matter that I'm using the lower PCI Express lane as the primary one is evidently defective? Seem to recall that the top one is used if it's a single GPU.

 

[mickyflinn]

So if your gpu is fine in the second slot then it points to your motherboard.

 

[Benass]

You failed to mention temperatures.
9 years can be very dusty. But then again maybe ur a good keeper and it's something not worth mentioning.

There is a chance your power supply maybe playing up. Or motherboard.
It's hard to test without pulling things out and putting them into different pc.

 

[geekyadz]

Last weekend though it'd frozen several times already, but one time upon rebooting it insta-froze upon loading Windows. Second time same thing but the screen goes blank. Third reboot was ok, only to return 10 minutes later and it'd frozen again. This time it was BSOD.

Upon troubleshooting.

Safe-mode was fine.
Installed windows on another partition - Froze
Tried my previous GPU and couldn't get a signal for some reason.
Put my R9 380x back in but tried the other slot. Much to my surprise this cured the problem, or provided a workaround at least.

It did actually suffer one freeze shortly afterwards, but just one and nothing since then. I don't recall any freezing or blank screens in games, and has always been when watching stuff or on some webpage etc.

I'd suggest looking into what caused the BSOD with a blue screen reader: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html it might tell you where the issue lies

 

[freddie64]

Worth putting a new CMOS battery in.

Not saying it will solve all your problems, but for a couple of quid it is worth a shot.

Dying battery can cause all sorts of faults.

 

[Smokey Deza]

Thanks folks.

I keep an eye on the temperatures and dust it out when they get too high, so no problems there.

Don't have any logs for the blue screen reader. The BSOD was more of a flash but I did see something like atiagdsys.dll, which helped point towards the GPU.

Swapping to the secondary PCI slot has definitely resulted in fewer freezes. Two since last weekend as opposed what would normally have been a dozen. Although not convinced it is just the motherboard express that is at fault, and perhaps there is a battery issue. It's a 650w Corsair but I would probably bet on the CMOS battery as suggested above?