Hey guys this is my first post around here, hoping somebody here might have some ideas on what my problem could be. First of all my computer specs: Q6600 @ 2.4GHz (stock) Asus p5k Deluxe mobo 2gigs crucial ballistix pc6400 evga 8800GTX OCz xtreme 700w PSU 320gig seagate barracuda hdd X-Fi xtremegamer soundcard razer barracuda headset razer tarantula keyboard razer copperhead mouse I am a pc gamer and I play call of duty 4. Now as of last night after playing for a long period of time the game locked up and i had some red dashes appear on the screen, I quickly shut down the computer without making an attempt to wait. My computer was able to boot up again but it took alot longer then normal to boot and load programs. I was able to load the game again too but 20 seconds into playing it did the same thing and I shut it down. Prior to last night over the past couple weeks the game would randomly crash to the desktop and give me a directx error shortly after but not a big deal. Immediately I thought it was my memory going so I ran memtest for 8 hours and made 20 passes over last night. 0 errors were found. Now my reason for thinking it was memory was because about 4 months ago, I had a similar situation. For about 2 weeks my computer started to do wacky things, such as my game crashing and getting random BSODs while playing, it also took longer to boot up then normal and wouldn't always load my keyboard or mouse drivers on startup, some programs had trouble starting I would get an error everytime I tried to run photoshop. One night I was playing cod4 for an extended period of time and it locked up with the graphics looking split up and had a soundloop of a gunshot sound. So at the time that happened I let it stay on for a bit to see if it would unfreeze. No I had to shut it down, now the problem here is my computer wouldnt boot up again. It would get power to everything but would not make an attempt to boot it just hung at a black screen. At that time I thought it was my motherboard which I then sent in for an RMA and received another shortly after. I installed it to find that it was not the motherboard, it turns out 2 sticks of memory must have been fried. I removed 2 sticks of the 4 that I had and it booted fine (which is why I have 2 gigs now I had 4 to begin with.) So before that situation I also had another time where I had I game crash and had similar errors loading programs and long statup periods, then the computer would also not boot but receive power to everything. So I was told to send my mobo in for an RMA which after I received it back it was fine. During this first period I had overclocked my cpu which I thought may have been the cause for the motherboard getting destroyed. But it was in no way an intense overclock that this hardware should not be able to handle it was at 2.75ghz and running stable with coretemps running at 60 celcius under full load. So as it stands now I am on my 3rd motherboard which I am fairly certain is not the problem (the previous 2 have been left at factory defaults). 2 sticks of memory which have passed 20 passes in memtest without any errors. My soundcard I have had before this computer and it always did weird things, the center channel would fade out after gaming for about 5 minutes so I just game in 4.1 sound. I figured there may be a chance that that is doing something because I had some similar issues on my previous PC. I removed the soundcard and its drivers and just use onboard but the problems persist. Another thing I also cannot set my memory to its required settings, I keep getting the error Overclocking Failed! on start up when I try to set the memorys voltage and timings, so my memory is running at different timings then suggested. Could the cmos battery be drained? Even though this one is only 4 months old? Another thing to note is my headset always has power to its LEDs which are always on when the computer is shut down? It did not do this on my previous PC. Overall I have had this PC for about a year now, gone through 3 motherboards and 2 sticks of ram appear to be fried. The only hardware brought forward from my previous PC is my soundcard. I really just don't know what to do anymore. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated and sorry for the long post. Any other details required just ask.
An update, after stress testing my cpu and get some temps, it didnt fail any p95 tests and the hottest it got to was 60 celcius under full load idles around 34 celcius my motherboard temperature according to the bios sits at 31 celcius. My 8800gtx idles at 61 celcius and after an attempt to stress test it with an older program, didnt seem very intensive at all and it ran very smooth for the first 15 seconds temp only hit 66 celcius, at this point it locked up and skipped to a new frame ever 5 seconds or so i then shut it down and upon entering bios i got some artifacts on the screen i went to boot windows and the boot text appears jarbled with yellow artifacts on the loading screen it then hung at a black screen with artifacts for a few seconds and gave me a nv4_disp blue screen error saying the driver was stuck in an infinite loop. I did some research on that error most people found a fix by booting in safe mode with networking and installing the newest nvidia drivers. I was able to boot into safe mode but with red dashes in verticle columns across my screen I uninstalled the old drivers and installed the new but still artifacts and the same nv4_disp error.
Ok so after a few hours I decided to start this computer up again, no artifacts anymore. 66 celcius was the video card temp when it locked up, and had colored artifacts on the screen even in the bios menu. Even idling it had the artifacts but now they are gone? I dont think it could be a temp issue that isnt very hot for a 8800gtx. Im clueless other then maybe the power supply or maybe running under load for CoD4 for hours the heat was too much for the video card? It seems like its on its last leg anyways.
