Hope some of you tech guru's can give me some advice.

Built/updated my rig recently - i5 2500k, xigmatek cooler, 8gb of Corsair 1600 CL9 DDR3 ram, Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H motherboard, 128 gb M4 SSD, and a 1 GB radeon 6850, running Win7 64 bit. Kept my Sonata III case and power supply (500 W) and audigy zs2 sound card.

The issue I'm having is that after (usually) 3.5 - 4 hours of active use, the system slows down to an extremely slow crawl, requiring a hard reset. This does not happen if I keep the system on (withou using it) overnight. After a reset, bios does not show high temps (neither does speedfan prior to the freeze). Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Kout

PSU is probably overheating. That's just my guess based on your specs.

Did you update your BIOS, chipset (motherboard), and device drivers to the latest versions?

Did you make any changes to Virtual Memory settings? Is the SSD the only drive in the machine?

Did you set AHCI mode in BIOS for the SSD drive?

BIOS and chipset should be up to date. Audigy is discontinued but installed the latest available drivers. Catalyst 12.1 drivers for the Radeon.
There's also a 500gb and a 1 tb hard drive.

SSD is in AHCI mode.

B4T may be on to something with the PSU (although it ran a core 2 duo and 8800 gts 320 without issues).

To clarify: the system doesn't bsod, just goes into extreme slow motion.

Thermal or Power Throttling?

Does that result in mouse movements being performed with a 20 sec delay? I'll check the cpu cooler and perhaps replace the psu.

Is the video slowing or the USB peripherals?

Can you detect fan speed changes when it slows down?

Does it slow down if the case cover is off? If not, then it may be overheating someplace.

When it goes into slow mode, and if the cover is off, check the fans with a flashlight - PSU and vid card fans, too. And the fan over the chipset if there is one.


If it is the USB peripherals and they are plugged into a USB hub then it could be the hub.

WC

I had a similar issue a few years ago and it turned out to be the PSU overheating. I went through everything I could do to fix it and it turns out the PSU had two fans, one to suck and one to blow out the back of the case. The one that was to blow out the case had gone on permanent vacation as it was one of those ultra cheap 80mm fans. I guess the suck fan would pull in all that hot air and then it would kind of swirl around inside the PSU too long causing it to cook. I guess when it would get too hot, it would drop the voltage enough to cause all kinds of weird things. Replaced it with a better quality 80mm fan and that was the end of my problems.

Just saying it could be your problem. An overloaded PSU will do the same thing.

Could be poor airflow too. Take the side cover off the case and direct a box fan at the opening and see how long it runs. If it is OK then, you have poor airflow causing something to get too hot.

Thanks guys.

General overheating was my first thought as well but the case is quite well ventilated and t temp readigs pretty much don't go over 37 - 40 C max. Power supply is quit hol by now and may need replacing (I recall getting some off-base voltage readings on y previous build).

Any suggestions for a brand?

One of the few places that grinds power supplies into the ground is at this place...

http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Review_Cat&recatnum=13

Double check to be sure you've got the heatsink centered on the cpu.
Don't overdo the heat dope, it takes very little, but be sure you've got even coverage.

Thanks everyone -- have replaced the PSU with a new 600W OCZ modxstream pro. Fingers crossed

Raw Kryptonite: ran prim95, one of the cores got a bit warmer than the others under full load (but <60C) - could this mean that contact with the heat sink isn't optimal?

Could, I'd just get in there with a flashlight and take a good look.

Thanks - under the Prime95 torture teststemps stay within 5 C of each other so I'm letting this go for now.

In any case, it looks like the problem is solved (touches wood) - more power solves problems!
Thanks everyone for their advice.

Freezing has returned, unfortunately. Found a 93 page thread on answers.microsoft.com by people with similar issues, unfortunately no clear answer. Back to the drawing board.

run Memtest on the Ram sticks individually and together. make sure all the ram are running optimally and no errors.

also check your Ram Usage when system gets slow.

this is how my old system would act when i use up all the ram/pagefile, and until i reboot it got crazy slow.

i had cases were my 2GB of Ram would have 1 MB free, and just clicking the task manager i had pinned took forever to come up.

i think I had some programs that had memory leaks (like Google Chrome did), as it would just chew up 800+MB sometimes for no reason.

Even on my new system Chrome tries to chew up as much ram as it can.

Thanks -- I have 8gb in a Win7 64 system so hopefully running out of memory shouldn't be an issue. Am running memtest now, which seems to run without any issues. May reset the bios which may help. One of my hard drives is a bit flakey, may disconnect it to see if that helps.

Bit Flakey how?

harddisks with a lot of bad sectors / failing will slow your system down to a crawl, expecially if windows is utilizing it.

I used to recover data for friends / family, and whenever i hooked a HDD that was failing it slowed my whole system down, windows took forever to boot, and accessing the drive in Recovery Software took all night to scan a small 40-80 GB Partition.

check event viewer hardware logs if there's HDD problems there should be NTFS / ATA / DISK errors/warining Icons.



also had a drive that for some reason lost power a few times, windows XP then kicked all my drives to PIO mode, which was crazy slow,

i had to reset my ESCD in my bios for windows to refresh the drive's hardware addresses and take them off lockdown, so I could force the override from PIO4 to UDMA4/5

Bit flakey as in speedfan SMART gives 0% fitness due to a Current Pending Sector Count of 2 and an Uncorrectable Sector Count of 1
Ran memtest for 9.5 hours last night without any problems.
Do you know how you match Disk Drives with IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in Device Manager -- it seems that one of the drives is stuck in PIO Mode 4 and it seems to be my SSD drive - which according to AS SSD Benchmark is ok for msahci and does 500 mb/s seq read, 180mb/sec write - the ATA Device Properties under "General" state that the SSD is at Location 0 (Channel 0, Target 0, Lun 0) and it is ATA Channel 0 that is in PIO mode.

Open Disk management and Device Manager.

Right Click the Drive name (Ie Disk 0, Disk 1, CDROM 0, DVD ROM 01, etc)
Choose Properties, It will show you the Hardware Name and Address on the Main general Tab

(Location 0 (Channel 0, Target 0, Lun 0),

Location 0 = Means Local
Channel 0 = The SATA Channel its on.

Match that Channel with The Channel thats in PIO Mode in your Device Manager.




Goto Volumes.

From there it will tell you which partition is on the drive.

Replaced the iffy hard drive - still getting lockups. Flash is a great For triggering the problem.

Next step: replace the wireless mouse with a normal one and if that doesn't work, take out the graphics card and use the intel graphics core - performance will be terrible but hopefully it will help in narrowing down the issue.

It looks like the pio mode 4 showing for the ssd is a bug - I'm assuming the speeds would be a lot lower otherwise.

The problem appears to have been the Audigy zs2 -- disabled it and the problems went away. Reactivated, Windows 7 found different drivers than the latest ones on the creative site. No problems yet.