Hi all,
thanks in advance for you help!
I've read through a pile of posts, and im still trying to figure out what must be causing my computer to do this.
Symptoms: The computer irregularly freezes up totally, no windows, no mouse movement ... nothing... and the sound on the speakers gets into a high pitch 1 second repeating tone similar to whatever natural music noise was going on before.
Total freeze. Then when I hit restart, and it boots Vista dremescene no longer runs because explorer.exe was not shut down properly (which I think is just subsequent of the real problem)
1. Is this the sound card failing? and subsequently crashing the OS? or the reverse, is it the OS crashing the soundcard?
2. Is this likely hardware? heat? voltages?
3. Is this software or drivers or , viral? I get no messages or errorcodes, it just freezes up seemingly randomly.
My computer specs:
Mobo: Asus Striker Extreme II NSE (watercooled edi)
Intel Q9450
2x XFX 9600 GT in SLI
Supreme FX sound card
Patriot 1600 DDR3
Antec 900 case (fans on mix of medium and low) Watercooled system
1 320 veliociraptor HDD used with Vista Ultimate 32bit OS, and 1 500gig Seagate extra HDD, no raid at all.
OCZ 550watt Stealth Xtreme ( I flipped the PSU upside down to get the cable management right, so I cut a hole in the bottom of the case about the size of a CD to let it breath in air).
Watercooling setup (feser 240 rad, swiftech 650 pump, 3/4 tubing on CPU block, and 1/2"on NB.) my operating temps given by "Core Temp" application says the cpu cores are at 44,47,46,45

Asus PC Probe app says ( I HAVE NEVER Overclocked this rig, its about 2 weeks old, I built it myself)
vcore 1.3 ,
+12v =12.29,
+5v= 4.84,
+3.3V 3.33,
Memory 1.90V
NB1.41v
SB 1.49v
CPU VTT 1.14
DDR3 term 0.93
CPU pll 1.52V
CPU 31'Celsius
MB 30 Celsius
OPT2 (my 240 radiator external and mounted on rear of case with a 120 fan exhausting through it) reads 35'Celsius.
anything seem wrong that would make my system unstable? Room temperature = 24' C

Any thoughts or suggestions greatly appreciated. I am a noob builder and this is my first homemade rig I went all out, and need it to work.
Thanks
Speedyquad.

Try with one GPU. If it works with one you you need a bigger PSU.

I would suspect sound card drivers. Uninstall them and remove that sound card. Try using onboard sound for a while to see how it behaves.
Your PSU should be capable of running a pair of 9600GTs, but if you got that rare lemon, roadrunner's test might confirm it.

what are you doing when it crashes?
just games? could be video related