Better games crashing

[dugdog]

Hello, I've recently been having a problem with my computer while playing video games that are more demanding. They all tend to crash after a while of playing. Sometimes it's after 5 minutes and other times it's after an hour or so. I have a Radeon R9 280x and I've used the AMD settings to underclock it and nothing changed. The card certainly doesn't overheat, it works at around 50-60C most of the time, even tried speeding the fans up, to no effect.
I also tried the 3DMark and Heaven Benchmark and neither of them crashed nor were there any issues with the card.
I've got no idea what could be the cause of those crashes. Ever since upgrading to Windows 10 I've also been getting random blue screens every now and then. Here's the list of the games that have crashed:
GTA V, NFS Shift2, Minecraft, Homefront 2, The Crew
The games that haven't ever:
DiRT3, ETS2, Telltale's TWD
At first I thought it was an Issue with Homefront 2, as it was the first game that has kept crashing for me no matter what, and then it happened with GTA and other games as well. It happens the same way for every game, the game shuts down or goes black and a message "XYZ stopped working" pops up.
Here are my computer specs:
MB: Asrock Z77 PRO4
CPU: Intel i5 2310 2.9 (OC'd to about 3.3)
PSU: Pure Power BQT L8-CM-630W
GPU: Radeon R9 280x
RAM: HyperX 2x4GB 1600MHz DDR3

I've looked everywhere for a fix, but nothing has seemed to help. At this point I'm pretty desperate to get it dealt with.

 

[Carnaxus]

Have you reinstalled your drivers since upgrading to Win10? Use DDU to uninstall the old driver, then install the latest one, preferably via manual download from the chipset manufacturer's site.

 

[dugdog]

Yeah, I formatted my pc before the "upgrade". I did it because the pc was acting weird, which turned out to be the hard drive dying, so I had it replaced. Should I try to reinstall the drivers anyway? Which drivers should I uninstall?

 

[Carnaxus]

If you use DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller, probably should have said that before), it'll uninstall the drivers in question; go to www.amd.com and find the drivers for your graphics card and install them.

Also, I searched for known issues with your card and GTA V, and found that there is in fact a known issue (an old one, but still) where if you have your grass settings at anything above "normal" it'll crash when you go to load into the game. Still poking around on the others, I'll update this post if I find more.

Edit:

Actually, I just found a post saying that AMD drivers starting at version 15.12 were causing all kinds of issues; the person recommended downgrading your drivers to 15.11.1, the last non-Crimson driver version. He even went so far as to provide a link to download 15.11.1 from. Use DDU and then install that version and see if that fixes things. If it does, don't update your GPU driver until a new version comes out; if it doesn't, c'mon back and we'll try some other stuff.

 

[dugdog]

I'm trying to install these drivers, but my pc freezes halfway through the installation every time. Afterwards it tends to freeze multiple times on startup. I'll try some more and give an update if it helps.
Edit: I've tried installing crimson, too. Freezes just as Catalyst installation did. I don't know what to do now, since I can't even install drivers :/

 

[dugdog]

I've just tried running the AMD Cleanup Utility, can't even open it because the computer freezes. Never used to happen before I used DDU, so thanks, I guess.

 

[Carnaxus]

Wat. DDU shouldn't break anything. This is starting to sound like some kind of hardware failure. As a last resort, you could always reinstall Windows...

 

[dugdog]

Ehh, I was hoping it wouldn't come to that, but tomorrow I'll format the hdd and reinstall the system. Well, technically not "reinstall", because I certainly won't be going back to windows 10, I'd much rather stick to the good old 7. Any guesses on what could be failing?

 

[Carnaxus]

Unfortunately, the only thing I can think of would be your GPU; I can't think of any other hardware-based reason why the drivers wouldn't install.

 

[dugdog]

I reinstalled everything and now it's better, although I haven't had time to play anything too heavy on the pc lately. I forgot to mention, every now and then the lower area of my screen (taskbar) freaks out. It sometimes gets jittery when I scroll down or watch/play something. It's not too often, so I forgot about it before but it's alerting nontheless.

 

[Carnaxus]

This is sounding more and more like a bad GPU, especially with DDU somehow messing things up worse. If you can, borrow an AMD chipset card from a friend and see if the issue persists.