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Strange problems... please take a look! (Aurora ALX)
Hello everyone,
So I've had my Alienware ALX since Nov. 2009 and like most I've experienced the odd issue and even had my motherboard replaced. I'm guessing the majority of you still have a relatively loud fan even when it's on the desktop screen doing nothing? I sure do, doesn't even quiet down like it did in the past.
Anywho. Basically when I play video games about 3 times a day the computer will just completely CRASH. Even if the game has been running for about 15 minutes it will still crash, it's not an overheating issue. When I say crash I mean the screen stays the same but an incredibly annoying loud squeeling and knocking buzz will blast out of my home theatre system. Nothing I do actually effects the application or computer and it must then be shut down manually.
I also seem to have an issue with ATI catalyst in the way that I ALWAYS have to re-enable Crossfire, extremely annoying.
Now my ATI drivers are up to date, as are all other drivers. I'm in no way a newbie so I'd imagine I'm not missing anything. I would just like to know if any of you have these issues? Should I ask for an entirely new PC and rid myself of this cesspool of problems or are the new computers still the same?
Any assistance or recomendations would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Cyrusis
23 Posts
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September 20th, 2010 20:00
Bump! Can anyone please give me advice? :(
morblore
2.4K Posts
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September 20th, 2010 21:00
Update your sig so people can see your specs. Nobody can really help you if they don't know what you have.
For the issue with the fan it could be you need to reinstall command center or maybe the MIO board is bad. Does the lights work? I had the MIO board go bad on my system and all the fans ran at 100% but since the board was fried I also had no lights. The fan could also be the software. Sometimes you just need to do a fresh install of command center to fix the fan issue. Did you check all the connections inside the case? They could have become loose during shipping. Check them all. You can even try reseating them. It's a pain in the butt but its worth a shot.
The computer hard locking when gaming can be a few things. On the top of the list is the known power connection issues. There is a diagram,or was, in the sticky on the top of the forums that showed you how they needed to be connected. You need to check that. It could also be driver related. You said you reinstalled drivers. Im guessing that didnt help? Did you update the motherboard bios? Have you tried a fresh install of windows yet? Are you running one video card or two? If two did you try removing one card to see if the issue goes away? Have you tried reseating the card/cards? Did you check your memory yet? You can run memtest86 and see if they are good. Do 5 passes and see if they throw any errors. Is the system overclocked any? What PSU do you have? Have you played with under clocking the cards to see if that had any affect on it?
What drivers are you using? Are they from Dell or ATI? Did you try the Dell ones yet? There are BIOS updates for a few ATI cards on the Dell site. Did you try them yet?
Does it always hard lock or have you ever got a BSOD? if you did get the BSOD did you write down the error code? You can go into the control panel and set it to not auto recover from a crash so if you do get the BSOD you have time to write it down.
MaWasHiii
3 Posts
0
September 21st, 2010 01:00
Hello everyone,
It seems that I have the same problem with my aurora alx delivered last week.
Some random crashes occur (especially when I play). There is no BSOD since I'm forced to restart manually.
I have tried to reseat my RAM, but the problem still occurs.
I also tried stress-testing, but impossible to finish one because my PC crash ... : '(
Memtest showed nothing abnormal
Someone had an idea / solution?
MaWasHiii
3 Posts
0
September 21st, 2010 02:00
Ty for your help,
I checked my power connection and everything seems ok..
I add my conf just in case it could help....
morblore
2.4K Posts
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September 21st, 2010 02:00
Check your power connection with this chart. They send the systems with the wrong video power connection order which will cause the hard lock.
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&cs=19&dl=false&l=en&s=dhs&docid=84D6A6EDA59E9719E040AC0A64E97CC4&doclang=en
morblore
2.4K Posts
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September 21st, 2010 15:00
Check them again. Make sure the 8-pin on each card is being powered by only ONE cable. So you have 1 cable going ONLY to the 8-pin on one card and the other cable going ONLY to the 8-pin on the other card. Then you take your cable that is not plugged into any cards and power the 6-pins on each card. You gotta make sure its like this or it will crash on you. The 1200w PSU has very low amps,half of what the 1100w has so if you do not have the cards connected like this it will never work. It just doesnt have enough amps on a single rail to run a card. You need to split the rails for each card.
If you can, post a pic of your connections.
MaWasHiii
3 Posts
0
September 22nd, 2010 01:00
I think I found my solution. Since the complete diagnostic system had revealed nothing suspicious, I thought of a software problem, I checked my drivers and I finally found a software that I used long ago: O & O defrag, it makes the defragmentation on the fly. It seems that the software runs very poorly concurrency in RAID 0 which causes the crash. I uninstalled that old thing and I have played all night without crash (I took the opportunity to do a quick benchmark with Crisis, it runs like a charm).
Hope this can help
Thank you for taking the trouble to read and reply to me