Computer freezes, screen flashes/flickers, followed by crash

[donsidbo]

Hi a built my pc a little over a year ago and have recently been going through a strange crashing issue. This most commonly happens when I watch videos or try to play a game. (upon loading the games, not in the menus) My computer freezes and then my screen starts flashing in a very unusual way. (video attached) Rarely, the computer will return to normal, but most often the computer will crash and restart. Once or twice, I've gotten a BSOD from this issue that read, "windows did not load correctly."

I thought it could have something to do with the graphics card since it most often happens with video games but I'm worried that it could potentially also be a windows issue or a PSU issue since my PSU is on the smaller side. (450W)

Sorry, I am still learning more and more about custom pc builds and would greatly appreciate any help anyone thinks they can offer.

[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1vWWOhrqbQ&feature=youtu.be"][/video]

 

[avenseth12]

Please list all your parts. Also, when was the last time you cleaned out all the parts. The freeze is most likely happen from your graphics card potentially being overheated due to dust.

 

[donsidbo]

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Nc64gs

I have since upgraded to 16GB of crucial ballistix low profile RAM and replaced the SSD with a Kingston SSDNOW 300v 120 GB.

I also have a cooler master for my CPU which is not listed in the link.

I cleaned my pc with air about two weeks ago, including removing the graphics card. Perhaps I need to try again?

 

[avenseth12]

No, that should be fine. I would go out to the web and find a few stress test programs (3D Mark Test) for your GPU and run one. Then run memtest on your RAM and make sure its okay.

 

[donsidbo]

No, that should be fine. I would go out to the web and find a few stress test programs (3D Mark Test) for your GPU and run one. Then run memtest on your RAM and make sure its okay.

Would using Heaven benchmark work well as a stress test for this? I would like to avoid the $25 cost of 3dmark if I can seeing as I am a poor college student. Thank you for all the help so far by the way. Much appreciated

 

[avenseth12]

Sure, you can use that and thanks

 

[donsidbo]

Sure, you can use that and thanks

So it's looking more and more like a graphics card issue. One of two things happens when I run heaven. (Max settings like I used to do when I was first testing after I built the pc)

Either the test runs for about a minute with slightly lower performance than what I am used to, followed by the flickering and freezing. Or the computer freezes as soon as I try to run the test. (This one happened 3/4 times I tried)