Question Computer recent slow down and then lock up

[Fengzhu88]

Hello everyone,

My current computer that I've had for 4 and a half years has recently had an issue where when I exit League of Legends, it will start running slowly such as delays in opening anything on the computer and the mouse freezing for a few seconds before being able to move it again. The first time it did it I went into task manager and saw something(can't remember what it was) was using a fair amount of both CPU and Disk Usage, so I ended the task and then restarted the computer. Didn't think much about it until a few days later when the same thing happened. This time I forgot to look in task manager to see if anything was doing the same thing and just restarted the computer. Afterwards I updated the graphics driver and turned off overlay in the Geforce Experience application. I also ran SFC /Scannow which found corrupted files and fixed them.

It had not done anything to me for another couple of days, but today one of my roommates, who plays World of Warcraft on my computer sometimes, was alt-tabbing out of the game and the computer started doing the same thing to them. It then eventually started doing it in the game, so they exited out of the game. Eventually the computer locked up completely to where task manager wouldn't come up or anything, so I hard rebooted the computer. Afterwards I ran check disk which found no bad sectors. I've looked in event viewer and have found nothing of note as well. The only thing that has changed recently was a few months ago I got a new 1440p monitor from my old 1080p monitor and that's it. Everything is set to 1440p and 120 hertz in game and natively. The only reason I bring that up is because so far it only seems to happen after exiting a game either through closing the application or alt-tabbing. I regularly dust out my computer every 6 months or so and right now there is a bit of dust on the GPU and the front chassis fans and that's it. Not sure if it's hardware issue somewhere or if it's overheating or what.

This has only happened while or right after playing two games. I've played quite a few other games recently that there has been no issue. It has only happened with League of Legends twice and World of Warcraft once over the span of a week or so.

Any thoughts or ideas? Here are my system specs:

Motherboard: ASRock Z370 Taichi
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8600K CPU @ 3.60GHz (6 CPUs), ~3.6GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070 8GB
RAM: Corsair 16GB DDR4
Hard Drive: Solid State 512 GB - Magnetic Drive 1 TB
Power Supply: EVGA 650W

 

[Fix_that_Glitch]

Have you monitored the cpu and gpu temps while gaming? It is possible your thermal paste for cpu or gpu, or both have started to degrade in 4 half years. How full are your drives?

 

[Fengzhu88]

GPU temps stay in the 60-70 C range while gaming. CPU temps are between 50-60 C. At least from what I've observed so far. I haven't monitored the temps for any extended period of time yet.

Solid state drive was 110 GB of 465 GB. Just now uninstalled a game I haven't played in a while and now it's 142 GB of 465 GB. Hard Drive is 250 GB of 931 GB.

 

[Fengzhu88]

My roommate told me that before the computer started going slow and then freezing, that the podcast they were listening to while playing the game started having audio stuttering and then after they paused the podcast the slowness started happening.

Today when attempting to tab out of World of Warcraft, the monitor went black and then brought up a message saying there was no signal from HDMI 1. Currently only have a display port cable plugged into the monitor from the graphics card. Did this a couple of times to at which one point trying to press the alt key in game by itself brought the black screen up with the no signal from HDMI 1.

I have had the monitor blink to a black screen for a couple of seconds occasionally since buying it. Sometimes it does it when alt tabbing out of a game(it will do it a second time), other times when going into a game it will do it and then go to the desktop. For Elden Ring, it often does it where when exiting the game it will go to a black screen and then you have to alt tab to get off the black screen.

 

[Fengzhu88]

The above issue was caused after installing Dell Display Manager Application. After uninstalling, the above issue has not re-occurred.

Haven't had the issue with the slow downs and freezes again yet either. Temps while gaming look quite good. I haven't applied thermal paste to the CPU or GPU since I got them with this system, and I also found out I haven't updated the BIOS at all since it came in its original packaging. The last update for this particular motherboard that is available is from three years ago. Guess I'll have to potentially look into doing that if it happens again.