I want to apologize in advance because I really have extremely limited information on what I'm about to ask.
I built a computer for a friend about a year or two ago. I ran multiple stress tests, had all the drivers installed, everything up to date etc and there was no issues at all. He recently now started having BSOD errors only when playing games, and it's been completely random when it actually happens. Sometimes he can play for an entire day with no error, sometimes within the first 10 minutes he bsods. I don't know what he's installed/done since the time that I gave it to him, so I know there's going to be a very limited amount of actual troubleshooting that can be done with me researching on his behalf.
This is the error that he gets
The specs are as follows
Motherboard: MSI A68HM-E33 V2
CPU: Athlon x4 860k
RAM: 2x 4gig Crucial Ballistix
PSU: Corsair cx 600
HDD: WD Black 750gb
OS: Windows 7 Home 64bit
GPU: Asus Strix R9 380
4 fans installed, so I doubt overheating would really be an issue. Also applied arctic silver to the cpu.
Like I said, I know there's not a lot of troubleshooting that can be done with such limited information but I was hoping someone would be able to give any insight based off of the picture. Googling the error code just came up with junkads like "download pctuner 9000!"
Unstable overclock or either your ram or hdd is on the way out. Try removing any overclocks, doing a memtest and check your SMART output
I don't have access to his computer, but I'll relay for him to do the test. I'm doubting it's the overclock, I did a very tiny bump from the stock 3.7 to 4 and ran multiple stress tests before I gave it to him, and everything checked out. I'd be more inclined to believe it could be the HDD, since that was secondhand.
the overclock is the most likely suspect. voltage degrades the chip over time so an inital stable overclock can become flakey after a while.
I dunno, I mean I can guide him through how to remove it but do you really think 300mhz is enough to bring it to death? I've seen that chip get much higher. I mean I know there's the silicon lottery, but that would have to be a real dud for 300mhz to cripple it lol.
depends on a lot of things. how old is the chip, the mobo, the psu, did you increase voltage, if so by how much? is the ram running at higher than 1600mhz? is the fsb overclocked as well? how about voltage strap? is LLC/vdroop on auto?
Lots of factors.
Chip was about a year old before giving it to him, board was brand new, psu was about a year old, I don't remember offhand but it was at 1.5v maybe a . off or so. Ram was at stock 1600, no other overclocks. Not familiar with llc/vdroop so I would have to assume they were auto.
You need him to run a good stability test on the CPU / RAM for a bit to rule those out. There is also HDD stability tests that can be ran.