Diagnose computer crash that leaves no trace?

[KHRZ]

Have had 4 crashes, 1st time it took a few weeks before the next, last 3 in the previous 2 days. Screen goes gray with some repeating pattern and noise in speaker. When I turn it on afterwards, no output to screen. First 3 times it worked again correctly after 10-20 minutes, last crash it has been over 15 hours before it worked again. At first I was thinking something overheated as I was playing SC2 each time it crashed, but not so sure anymore, all temperatures are low anyway, no help in changing thermal paste. So I'm thinking some component is just really unstable or something. But not sure how to actually uncover anything about the issue....

[DrHouse64]

Try removing one component and use your computer to see if crashes still occur ? I would begin with the GPU. Did you try updating your gpu driver, or downgrade to a older one ?

[DacoTaco]

basically what drhouse said.

i think gpu overheated and caused an issue that is coming back over and over. if gpu dies, pc crashes/freezes and that could cause a weird noise like the gamecube FSOD sound

but first make sure it REALLY is the gpu

[KHRZ]

Haven't played any SC2 and now the PC have worked fine for over 20 hours. Still though I would have guessed it falled back on the integreated graphics if the GPU fails or when it boot up...

Also something I realized is there's a custom SC2 game I've been playing, where you can zoom out a lot and view 4 times as much area on the screen. If this overloaded the GPU, maybe Blizzard was wise in limiting the zoom...

But' I'll take the GPU out and see if it crash.

[NaturalViolence]

Anything in event viewer?

[Der Siebte Schatten]

[color=#000066]I had similarly the same issue a few years ago, when my main computer was fitted with an nVidia 9600GS. The problem with the 2007-2008 era GPUs was that they overheated very easily and often, welds (is it the right word?) were also fragile on those GPUs. Once they overheated too much, they become very buggy.

I only understood my problem was overheating (black screen, buggy sound and no trace in event viewer) when I launched SpeedFan before playing and it was saving logs every 10 seconds. Otherwise, I wouldn't have saw that as well because after resetting the computer, temperatures lowers very quickly...
Anyway, I hope it's not the GPU that is already damaged, I have very few confidence about the "oven trick" to solve this (even if a few friends did this successfully)...[/color]

[DacoTaco]

[color=#000066]I had similarly the same issue a few years ago, when my main computer was fitted with an nVidia 9600GS. The problem with the 2007-2008 era GPUs was that they overheated very easily and often, welds (is it the right word?) were also fragile on those GPUs. Once they overheated too much, they become very buggy.

I only understood my problem was overheating (black screen, buggy sound and no trace in event viewer) when I launched SpeedFan before playing and it was saving logs every 10 seconds. Otherwise, I wouldn't have saw that as well because after resetting the computer, temperatures lowers very quickly...
Anyway, I hope it's not the GPU that is already damaged, I have very few confidence about the "oven trick" to solve this (even if a few friends did this successfully)...[/color]

i think the word youre looking for is solder, as in the solder balls underneath the gpu.

[NaturalViolence]

Agreed, is most likely the GPU board issue. If it is though there is a good chance that the gpu driver will crash and leave an event viewer log entry just before the rest of the OS crashes.