Hiii!
I 'm not even sure if this is the right section, but here goes. Around october, I finally build myself a comp. Now however it locks up sometimes and I 'm trying to find out why. And I figured I could start looking for help by coming back to my roots ! If this board is still alive and if anyone remembers me, I used to go by the awesome name of Spectral Paladin.
As to what exactly happens, the comp simply locks up, or "hangs" or freezes, or however you want to call it. The only option is to use the reset button or hold the power one to shut it down. It has happened while I 've been doing different things; the only thing that has invariably been there was Fritz running (Deep Fritz 11 to be exact). However, that doesn't say much since I have it running pretty much all the time lately. Worth noting is that when fritz engine is running (ie it is looking for a move), it runs all four cpu cores at 100%, however the computer has locked up both when this was the case and when fritz was simply idle in the background while I was browsing the web.
What is funny is that after these lockups, my computer's date and time seem to be reset, back to 1 january 2003. I also had my resolution settings screwed up once.
A couple of interesting facts more. Ever since I build this comp I sometimes get a 4C error on the motherboard (an EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLi). There is no explanation for it in the manual - it is "reserved". I 've looked it up online and there are people who have trouble with it, but I didn't really find a solution. Fortunately, I don't get the error every time; all I have to do is keep resetting until the comp starts up. Usually when this happens, certain voltages in the bios setup are reset; and I have to go up them again. I should note that I have not overclocked at all - I had to up the voltages from grey ranges up to green ones in order for the comp to work, as it would freeze when I initially left them untouched.
Also this may seem strange, but my drivers are not up to date. I updated them when I first built the comp of course and hoping to fix the above error. However, due to so many horror stories I 've read, I decided "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and haven't done anything ever since.
One last thing, if this could be a temperature problem; for my cpu cooler is mounted the wrong way, with its fan facing the graphics cards. I only realised after it was in place and chose to leave it there for the following reasons: it was a real pain getting it in there, I was not planning to overclock for the time being (and still haven't) and moreover, I had read that sometimes the cpu fan was actually used to "cool" the graphics cards (even though it's pumping hot air -.-). The truth is I didn't have any problems for quite a while. When I first made the comp I was primarily playing world of warcraft with no problems - now thinking back, it may have frozen once, but that was it.
I 've attached the dxdiag file, the good old fashioned way.... I hope you can be of help!
