- Mon Dec 29, 2014 5:48 pm
#384707
Hey Eric,
I second photomg1's notion that it may be your PSU. I do a lot of home based IT work for people and I've seen just in the past 6 months, 4 name brand power supplies fail in less than a year (not pointing fingers but one was Corsair and one was EVGA, I can't remember what the other 2 were). One instance in particular was very similar to what your describing. Instant BSOD that "appeared" to be tied to launching various applications (for them it was just Internet Explorer). It was hit or miss, which was the troubling part. The other thing that was happening was it would lock up sometimes right before the crash, but that also was hit or miss. There were no obvious signs that the PSU was going either. It sounded great, didn't appear to overheat, and didn't show signs of failing capacitors. However, once replaced, the system has and still is running great.
If you haven't updated your BIOS, there's no evidence of bulging capacitors on your motherboard, and your running the pretty stable version of Maxwell (3.0.1), then the chances it's your PSU are actually pretty high. For a component that doesn't do any real processing, your PSU is actually really complex. Any little fluctuation in it's performance can have unpredictable results. You may even find signs of bulged capacitors in the PSU itself.
The good thing is that in terms of hardware, it's one of the cheapest things you can fix, unless you need some insane, 1500 watt PSU. They make inexpensive voltage testers for PSU's that are designed for the various forms of ATX connectotions, but that won't tell you what you really need to know. A true PSU load testing device is outrageously expensive and can only really be affordable to manufacturers. If you don't have an extra PSU laying around, you could get one from a store that sells components, test the system, and then return it if it doesn't solve the issue. Just double check the return policy prior to making the purchase.
This is just my 2 cents. Good luck man!
Regards,
Zack Parrish
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Maxwell - 4.2.0.3
Maxwell 4 | 3ds Max - 4.2.4
336 capable Maxwell threads!
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Workstation:
Dual E5-2680v3, 64GB, Quadro K5200
48 threads (HT) @ 139.2GHz
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Render Farm:
288 threads (HT) @ 835.2GHz