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Hardware problem, but which one...?


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For the last three days I have been experiencing a very strange problem that I will have difficulty explaining, here are the facts:

  1. My PC that I have been using for the past three years without a single problem suddenly does not boot to Windows 7 Home Premium automatically, it would systematically stop on the boot page asking me to go through the BIOS settings to recover them. Since I avoided changing anything in BIOS, I can't understand why I suddenly have to go through this every time, but this is only a minor irritant and might hide something else that I am not aware of that is why I mention it
  2. When I started my last three flights, I had no problem at all, but approximately three hours later when at cruising altitude or in one case during my descent, the aircraft suddenly becomes uncontrollable, I have huge and wild swings to the right or left, the automatic pilot disconnects and flying manually is not an option, on a couple of occasions I could save the situation and come back to my cruising altitude, but a few minutes later, the same would happen again and again leading to my abandoning the flight
  3. After each incident I checked the video card temperatures and noticed some extreme variations up and down in seconds max around 65°C, min 35°C, this is obviously technically impossible and indicates that something else is cooking (literally). At this stage, it is important to note that I did not change any of my settings on my PC and/or graphic card since I was perfectly satisfied with them. I did download a plane (Carenado PC12) and a scenery (France VFR Martinique) recently, both of which have been used with no difficulty whatsoever.
  4. The three occurrences happened with the Aerosoft Airbus A320, but there again, I can't see any reason for it to be the culprit since I used it extensively in the past with no problem either.
  5. I did a HDD optimisation with Auslogics defrag software a few days before these events happened.

I fear that I may have a hardware problem: CPU, GPU?, I have no idea, my CPU settings were initially optimized by IT professionals to keep voltage and temperatures under control, and I used them without touching what I was not familiar with. Would any of the above information ring a bell to any of the tech minded folks of this forum? Thanks for any help. (My specs are in my profile)

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Regarding #1 above, have you cleaned the inside of your PC in the last three years, your problem with booting into Windows maybe related to how much dust ect. is in the PC.  Your HSF may need to be reseated and the thermal paste replaced.  If your PC is overclocked the above would apply even more.  Maybe your CMOS battery needs replaced and/or you need to clear CMOS and put all of your BIOS settings back in from scratch.

 

Regarding #2-4 above, #5 maybe the cause.  I do not think #5 would have anything to do with #1 since your OS drive would not come into play until after you have booted past what you are seeing in #1 and Windows actually starts to load.

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Many thanks for your feedback, I shall check your points regarding item 1, I believe you may have guessed right regarding the battery because I do not leave my PC on standby ever, I unplug it when not in use and it remains off for many months in a row each year when I am abroad.

Thank you again, I shall report back.

Interestingly, I made the same flight as the one of this morning that I had to abandon, but with the 737NG PMDG (instead of the Aerosoft Airbus) and could complete it even though the graphics load was heavier than with the Airbus (aircraft, weather, sceneries), the temperature of the GPU never exceeded 65°C, I need more experimentation for that second part.

 

Best regards,

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Sounds to me as if your motherboard may be having problems during POST due to a potentially failing component.  As to what it is it's hard to tell; some mobos have an LED diagnostic display on them which report failure codes that are defined in your mobo's owner's manual.  As for the in flight stuff, it is possible that your controllers' hardware interface in your computer, e.g. USB, is acting up such that the computer sees junk coming from the controllers when in fact the actual controllers are fine (or maybe not, see below).  While this scenario can explain the behavior and can tie in with your boot up issue, I must add that all I've stated is only a big maybe.  Happy hunting and good luck!

 

P.S. As an experiment to make sure the boot issue is not caused by your controllers, unplug all of them before powering up your computer and see if that solves the boot  up problem; again a 100% guess but it's easy to try.

Rod O.

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1.My PC that I have been using for the past three years without a single problem suddenly does not boot to Windows 7 Home Premium automatically, it would systematically stop on the boot page asking me to go through the BIOS settings to recover them. Since I avoided changing anything in BIOS, I can't understand why I suddenly have to go through this every time

So I take it you aren't overclocking? Usually if the CMOS battery is failing, Windows clock reads the wrong time randomly.

 

 

2.When I started my last three flights, I had no problem at all, but approximately three hours later when at cruising altitude or in one case during my descent, the aircraft suddenly becomes uncontrollable, I have huge and wild swings to the right or left,

 

That sounds like the "sudden wind shift" issue. It relates to your weather generation software and certain aircraft. Nothing to do with hardware. ASN doesn't suffer from this issue, so what weather generation add-on are you using. Search on Avsim for more about this issue.

 

 

 

3.After each incident I checked the video card temperatures and noticed some extreme variations up and down in seconds max around 65°C, min 35°C, this is obviously technically impossible and indicates that something else is cooking (literally).

 

No, that is technically possible. Modern graphics cards have very efficient coolers and temps reduce rapidly as the load does. What did it do? Was it 65 and then dropped to 35 quickly, or continually fluctuate? 65 is not cooking, it's within a GPU's normal range.

 

 

my CPU settings were initially optimized by IT professionals to keep voltage and temperatures under control,

 

I suggest you ignore the "IT profesionals" and set yoiur BIOS to default. Dodn't be surprised if your cold boot issue vanishes.

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Many thanks for all the feedback.

 

To Alex, yes I do have Realtech drivers installed

 

To Martin, I changed my CMOS battery this afternoon, re wrote the settings in BIOS and I am back in business, no need to enter BIOS anymore when booting (thanks to idahosurge for his advice, I completely forgot about that detail...).

 

As I indicated in my second message, I did another flight with the PMDG 737 NG this time (instead of the Aerosoft Airbus) on the same route with the same ASN weather, with strong headwinds of 120 knots, heavy cloud cover, accelerated flight x4, heavy sceneries (FlyTampa and FSDT), no problem at any time, whereas I lost control of the Airbus three flights in a row in exactly the same conditions. So that may be software related after all, but I will need more testing to confirm that. 

 

Regarding the temp graph of the GPU, it was not gentle waves but abrupt variations like very sharp saw teeth at brief intervals and high frequency... so I am aware that temp do fluctuate during usage, but that was not ordinary fluctuations, that's why I though my hardware was getting into trouble. My GPU (Nvidia GTX 680) is not overclocked but my CPU (i3770) is at 4.5 Ghz. 65°C is very frequently where my card temp is after a simulation so I was not concerned about it, more about the shape of the graph I was seeing!

 

I will experiment tomorrow with another flight on the PMDG 777 with an FSDT departure and arrival, if it can take it, then anything else should work!...

 

Again many thanks for your help, Gentlemen, this was highly appreciated.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well after more than a week of inaction in simming and after successfully overclocking my CPU to 4.5 Ghz (it was lost after I changed my battery in BIOS), I started a flight from KIAD to KORD with the PMDG 737 NG and weather with ASN, soft clouds from Rex (almost blue skies).

 

At the gate I had a slide show of 5 to 7 fps, my mouse uncontrollable, Track IR was a pain and sounds were garbled in my headset. I decided to continue all the same, went to the Display window to see what was eventually wrong, but seeing that my previous settings (that I had been using for three years successfully) were unchanged, I closed the display window and... my fps jumped to 25!!!

 

I continued my flight with this sort of good performance, my fps being limited to 30 within FSX. From time to time during that short flight though, I noticed that I had  "static" in my headset, my screen was getting jerky, my fps down again into single digit, and without me doing anything, after a few minutes it would get back to normal with 25 to 30, a perfectly smooth flight.

 

On final at KORD with heavy cloud coverage (8/8 actually at 800), I made the approach on the ILS with the HUD keeping a "solid" 17 fps, except for a few seconds at about 3000 feet in the clouds, when again my display went down suddenly to 6/7, static again in the headset, no control on the mouse, and back to normal, landed and had more than 20 fps in FSDT KORD to taxi to my gate.

 

What can cause these sudden perturbations to my display, mouse and sounds: My GPU or my CPU? I had my Asus suite temp recorders in the background on at the beginning of the flight and stopped them because I suspected them to be the culprit so I have no info regarding temperatures unfortunately. Would this be a repetition of the original problem mentioned in my first post when I was losing control of the Aerosoft Airbus from time to time? This though was before doing anything to my PC (changing the battery and redoing the previous OC to 4.5), that would mean that it could be the same problem, and I am more less back to square one, or is it?

 

Thank you for any feedback.

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