Freezes/BSODs, with artifacts

[treythomas123]

My fairly new pc (2-3 months) has started to have freezes/blue screens, sometimes with artifacts visible.

My graphics card is a Sapphire 4870 (1gb GDDR5)

I think there might be a problem with the temperature sensor on the graphics card, because even while playing Crysis at near-max settings, it only reports 50-55C. I've read that other people using this card see temps up to 80C with no problems, so something seems wrong there. My original thought was that the card was overheating and the temperature sensor wasnt detecting correctly, and therefore not automatically increasing the fan speed, causing it to freeze. However, if that was the case, manually setting the fan speed should have stopped the freezes, but it didnt. I have it running at 50% constantly, even when not gaming, and it still freezes sometimes (always when watching videos or playing games).

Any input would be very helpful. I'm not overclocking anything. The card, processor, and RAM are all running at default speeds.

 

[eyeCpc]

Do you see any specific error codes or drivers identified when having a blue screen? You can go into the advanced system settings if you start having any sudden restarts to disable the automatic reboot option to pause the system in order to get that.

The second place to look without any of the other being seen is the event viewer logs themselves. Sometimes a manufacturer will be named where you can trace that back to the video, sound, or other hardware or software device driver trying to access a system reserved memory address.

Too often that's the main cause besides a corrupt video or sound driver needing to be updated. The other thing besides software/driver problems would be any memory faults being seen if the general temps for the system are well within reason. The actual temps for the card may just be accurate at the 50-55C which sounds about right while something else is running hot!

 

[treythomas123]

No errors are reported in the event viewer log when it crashes. It doesn't always BSOD, usually it just freezes the screen and replays like the last 1/10 second of audio over and over again. So without the BSOD error codes, I don't have much info to work with.

Also, I don't think any hardware is trying to access system reserved memory. If that was the case, I don't think the freezes would consistently happen while doing graphics intensive things.


I'm really thinking the problem is with the video card, but I don't know if its a software/driver problem or if its a problem with the hardware. I need to identify the problem, and FIX IT

 

[eyeCpc]

Not necessarily! When something causes a video driver to load sideways if you follow me on that you often end up seeing some specif error sooner or later. That's when you know a driver is toast! or simply the wrong version.

When an update is garbage in the case of some seen in both NVidia and ATI updates you end up seeing unexpected problems of various types like freeze ups when you are not doing much of anything simply browsing a page or looking through a folder and suddenly the "? is not responding" error is the only one seen.

The part about hearing a loop happening with sound brings in something else there however! Looping sounds as well as crashes in anything like games or media can be sound related problems with nothing to do with the video drivers on. A flaky sound driver can be a problem for anything where sound is mixed in.