Computer randomly freezing/crashing

[Seraph]

My computer has been randomly freezing and crashing since I built it a year ago. It used to happen every few days or so but I think that it has happened about 5 times today, so I am getting really annoyed.

Sometimes it just crashes like a random restart and doesn't give me an error message at all.

Sometimes (rarely) it gives me a BSOD (no driver problem line or anything)

Sometimes it just freezes and loops the last sound playing.

and sometimes, and this is the scariest, it freezes, loops the last sound a couple of times, and then the system speaker starts ringing. If you have ever played CS Source, it sounds almost exactly like a flashbang: A constant, high-pitched squeal. This has happened a few times overnight when only background programs were running, and it just happened for the first time while I was actually doing something on the computer.

Here are my specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+
Mainboard: Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe
Memory: 2GB Corsair DDR2
HDD: Samsung 500GB 7200rpm 16mb cache
Video: eVGA NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT/GTO
Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
Power: Antec True Power 2.0 500W


The hard drive is new, because I thought the old one might be the cause of the crashes and I needed a new one anyways. It didn't change the frequency of the crashes, so I don't think that is the problem.

Help?

 

[eyeCpc]

The problem there sounds more like something overheating. The board speaker sounds an alarm for one of two things. 1) fans slow down below the speed set 1) cpu overheat hardware protection circuit

Another item to consider is the video card getting hot. Have you monitored temps at all? PC Wizard 2008 is a free benchmarking program that will also display video card temps as well as those for the cpu, board, and hard drives. That can be found at CPUID

 

[Seraph]

Well what are good/acceptable running temperatures for my hardware?

 

[Vaanish]

CPU: I would say that 70*C is unnacceptable.
GPU: Anything above 90*C is dangerous.

If Cool n' quiet is off, turn it back on again.

 

[Schecters]

You might (big might) have faulty hardware. When I first built my computer a couple of years ago, I had pretty much the exact same thing happen as you. I bought more ram, checked all temps, replaced my psu, blah blah blah and nothing fixed it. Then one day I decided to try my video card in one of the sli slots and not in the single slot. And then I never had the problem again. The middle pci e slot just didn't function correctly.

So this probably isn't the case for you, but keep in mind that some things just don't work right, and aren't always as easy to diagnose.

 

[eyeCpc]

One long and two short beeps heard generally points at the video card having failed or seeing a fault. If there is a distinct pattern like that then the sounds heard from the speaker on the board are pointing at a hardware problem. With fans cluttered with dust and slowed down an alarm may be sounding off for that.

Checking temps and seeing what the minimums are for the alarms set in the bios would be the things to look at first. When was the last time the case was cleaned out with a can of air cleaner? Are you using the stock hsf on the cpu there? Another thing to try is a memory test program like memtest to see there are faults with the memory installed causing this.

 

[imconfused]

have you tried running on onboard display for extended amounts of time? maybe it is the video card itself, if you don't have any problems when you're using onboard video then you may have found your culprit!

 

[eyeCpc]

For a brief period of time here until ATI released the Catalyst 7.10 the new build here was seeing blue screens with a driver error, sudden restarts too!, and crashes to the desltop and royal freezeups when running a game. But all that was due to ATI's need to release a patch and then the 7.10 version since it was all software related.

The audio alerts have to be taken a little more seriously. The only thing onboard there is the C-Media 7 channel onboard audio. That was no surprise since the Asus M2N-E also comes with only onboard audio and not any vpu chip.

 

[Seraph]

I don't really think that it is just overheating, though that may be one thing, I don't know. I have been monitoring it more closely now and the temperatures seem fine, nothing really out of the ordinary.

Yes, I have the stock heatsink on the cpu.

What makes me think that it may not be overheating is that it crashes sometimes when I am doing nothing and the heat is low, and then I can be playing a game and putting the computer under a full load and it doesnt crash. I don't know. its wierd.

 

[Vaanish]

Clean all grafix drivers out of your system using a driver cleaner, and re-install them. Good driver cleaners can be found on Guru 3D.