13.10 constant system freezing

[drewbacca]

Hello. I recently purchased and built a new computer to serve as a Steam/gaming platform. I am semi-new to Ubuntu and Linux in general.

I am having a real bad problem with system freezing. Whenever I play a game, use my webcam, or listen to music I invariably get a total lock up that I can't fix without a hard boot. REISUB doesn't work, nor does CTL+Alt+F1-6. The freezing is not immediate, it crops up after about 45-2 hours of game play, or after hours of webcam use or listening to music on Clementine.

At first I assumed it was a hardware issue, so I installed psensor and left it up while gaming to check CPU and GPU temperature when the system freezes. The CPU was at 40c and the GPU 65c. I then assumed bad memory and booted to grub and ran memtest86, but this found no error. I left up gnome-system-monitor and checked the memory usage at freeze, and found I never used more than 20% of my memory.

At that point I thought it was a driver issue, so I downgraded my nvidia drivers from nvidia-331 to nvidia-319. This seemed to have worked for a few hours, and then it went right back to freezing every 45 minutes or so when gaming. This happens across all games I own, from ones running in Wine and Playonlinux to native games purchased from Steam.

From there I assumed it might be strange things like my SSD acting up (I have since followed the optimization guide here: https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd) or the lack of swap space (I figured with 16 gigs of ram I hardly needed swap. Created a swap file, but that didn't help.)

When not doing the activities above, the system is perfectly stable to the point I can leave it running for days without issue.

Being so new to Linux/Ubuntu, I am sure there are things I didn't think to check or know to look for. Can I please get some advice?

Current System stats:
OS: Ubuntu 13.10
DE: Gnome Flashback (with Compiz effects)
Processor: AMD FX(tm)-9590 Eight-Core Processor 4.7 Ghz
Memory: 16 Gigs (x2 8 Gb PC3 12800)
Storage: 60 GB SSD (/) and 500 GB HHD (/home)
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB (driver nvidia-319) using Twinview

[drewbacca]

Interesting...

I crashed again after writing this post. On boot, the system would freeze up on login. Uninstalling/reinstalling the nvidia driver didnt help, uninstalling gnome/reinstalling didn't help, nor did trying a new desktop enivroment (tried Unity.)

However, after I uninstalled xorg and reinstalled, I was able to log in. I am still super unstable, but I am wondering if there might something wonky with xorg?

Edit: Sympthoms also seem to indicate hardware failure of the graphics card. I ran several stress test, which all seem to be passing much to my surprise. Whatever is causing the freezing doesn't seem to be due to the card malfunctioning.

[petr-nosek]

I thing, your problem is similar to mine. Nobody has solution:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...x/+bug/1251042

Open source drivers are unstable for me too (this bug):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...u/+bug/1241595

It has been reported 1 mounth, but still no assigned :'(