[SOLVED] For some reason increasingly more games that run perfectly fine otherwise are freezing my entire computer and its not exactly a toaster

Darkshock

Honorable
Feb 27, 2017
44
1
10,535
Ill be playing and it will seem to be running fine then it spontaneously freezes. The first tine it happened i thought i could just controll alt delete but it doesnt bring up the screen that allows me to open task manager to force quit. Dota, insurgency, fortnite valorant, and cemu (xenoblade chronicles x) have been consistently freezing my computer. I dont know what's causing it. It doesnt do it with csgo nearly as much. I played valorant in the beta and it never did that. the other day i was playing fortnite and i never had any issues until that day and it started doing it. Also i have nier automata which is one of the more demanding games and its playable. I have skyrim se and the only reason i had freezing issues was outdated mods but other then that even with 15 or so mods, the game runs fine. My gpu drivers are up to date too. Its not a ram issue because i have 16gb. I could understand if i was using a $300 laptop with integrated graphics but i have a ryzen 5 and a gtx 960. Theres no reason it should be doing that. I even went as far do delete windows off of my hdd and do a clean reinstall. Not just a factory reset. If anything i do have the watermark but since i moved recently im out of a job so i cant pay for that.
 
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Solution
You should always list your complete hardware list when asking for troubleshooting help.

Fresh install points to some sort of hardware failure.

Saying you have 16GB of memory, doesn't mean all of it is working correctly. Run memtest x86.

Check the SMART logs of your disks with CrystalDisk, could be a drive problem causing data corruption in your game files/savegame files.

Always monitor your temperatures. CPU or GPU could be overheating. GTX960 is getting fairly old, if it has a lot of hours on it, might be time to re-do the thermal paste. It could also be dying. Run it through some benchmarks and see how it compares to other results (Unigine Heaven, 3D Mark Firestrike, or some other standard bench) It may also have simply degraded...

Eximo

Titan
Ambassador
You should always list your complete hardware list when asking for troubleshooting help.

Fresh install points to some sort of hardware failure.

Saying you have 16GB of memory, doesn't mean all of it is working correctly. Run memtest x86.

Check the SMART logs of your disks with CrystalDisk, could be a drive problem causing data corruption in your game files/savegame files.

Always monitor your temperatures. CPU or GPU could be overheating. GTX960 is getting fairly old, if it has a lot of hours on it, might be time to re-do the thermal paste. It could also be dying. Run it through some benchmarks and see how it compares to other results (Unigine Heaven, 3D Mark Firestrike, or some other standard bench) It may also have simply degraded and you need to give it a slight underclock.

Update your motherboard BIOS, changes in Windows can cause issues to appear. Latest drivers might not get along with an older BIOS revision.


If you've had a lot of these parts installed for a while, first thing I would do is take the system apart and put it back together. Repeated heat cycles can cause GPUs to get loose in their slots, GPU sag can make the connections intermittent, cables could be loosely connected.

You would be surprised how many times problems stemmed from a loose SATA data or power connector or GPU that just needed to be re-seated.

After that, maybe look at the power supply. They slowly degrade over time, and at some point will cause instability when the capacitors get old. Much harder to track down.
 
Solution