ManOfColour 08-18-2012 at 03:23:52 PM
Firstly, I apologize if this is in the wrong section. I couldn't find a general "technical issues" forum and so I'm going to ask for help in here.
I've had my current setup for about a year now and it's been running without issue. Recently I started to get really terrible display driver crashes that would distort the colours of pixels on my screen and sometimes take a minute or so to recover from. After this happened a couple of times while playing games, using firefox or just windows explorer, I decided to upgrade my drivers to a more stable version.
This solved the display driver crashes but shortly after my PC started to freeze after an hour or two of use. The freezes do not effect the cursor or my audio, in fact I can even use my headset to communicate. After a while a BSOD will very briefly flash on the screen and the computer will crash. The PC then boots to a black screen with a flashing white underscore. I know from experience that this can sometimes be caused by boot priorities or USB connections, but changing these does nothing. What does work though, is unplugging all my hard drives and booting up. This gives me the "reboot and select boot device" message. I then shutdown, reconnect my hard drives and boot up again and windows will run perfectly until the next freeze.
I'm unsure whether or not the display drivers are directly related to this, but
i've tried uninstalling/reinstalling different driver version (all
clean installs). Running through the on board graphics seems to prevent the
freezes, but rebooting results in the same situation. The hard drives don't seem
to be corrupted as when windows finally boots I can access and edit the data
without problem. I've even spent the day cleaning each part individually in case
something was overheating due to dust build-up, but this hasn't solved anything.
*EDIT* I've searched around and tried disabling my Nvidia HD audio drivers, but this hasnt helped. I've also tried unplugging my CD/DVD drives and each HDD/SDD, but no luck yet.
PSU issue?
I did some checking and it turns out that my SSD (crucial M4) required a firmware update. This fixed the issue, but now my PC's performance isn't desirable. It constantly has mini freezes that last about 5 seconds. This happens at random intervals and i'm not sure whats causing it.
My PSU is a thermaltake toughpower Qfan 650W, I've had it for maybe a year and a half.