Games freezing after OC applied?

[genthug]

System specs:
cpu: FX 6100 base 3.3 currently running at 3.9 GHz. Have gotten to a stable 4.15 GHz air cooled.
gpu: Asus Strix R7 370 OC 4GB
mb: Asus M5A99X Evo
psu: Cooler Master GX 750W 80+ Bronze
ram: G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3 1600MHz 12GB
cpu fan: Zalman CNPS9500A
I've recently been dabbling in OCing my machine, as when it was first built, it had the stock 6100 and a GTX 550 in it. At the time, that was great. WoW ran on ultra, life was good. Fast forward three years, and now it's starting to bog down. Got the new GPU a few months ago, am now looking to OC my CPU to get a bit more oomph out of it. Now, I don't know if the issue comes from OCing my CPU, or clocking up my GPU, but doing both seems to freeze the games I'm running after about a minute and a half of gameplay. To rectify this, I turned the CPU down from 4.1 GHz to 3.9 and knocked the voltage off a bit, and backed off the GPU clock on my r7 370 from 1150 to 1100. That seems to have fixed the problem. Question is: why would it be making my game freeze? My components aren't overheating. Well, I'm 95% sure they aren't overheating. Under stress, my R7 370 is hitting 65C, my CPU on a prime 95 hitting 56C at 3.9. Could it be the massive amount of power the r7 370 uses under load? Would that cause the game to freeze? I can alt tab out of the game into the rest of my machine to navigate.
Many thanks to all inputs.

 

[Calculagator]

When you overclock, you run the chips faster than they were designed. Sometimes they can handle it and sometimes they cannot. Overheating is not the only reason for overclocked chips to fail. From your description, it sounds like your GPU is/was not stable at your former overclock. If the CPU were unstable, the entire system would most likely crash. You've done what you can-increasing the voltage may allow a higher overclock but with increased power usage and heat generation.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Not to mention the power supply is poor quality http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=188 it could play a role also.

 

[genthug]

So, essentially: Get better/larger PSU?

 

[Calculagator]

Your psu may not be great, but I doubt it is the primary cause of your problem. It's not shutting down or overheating. As long as you don't load it, the PSU should work ok, and I don't see why your system would overload it-even with some overclocking. A better PSU could help, but there would be no guarantee. Some chips cannot overclock well.

 

[genthug]

Well, with the games that I play (open world, minecraft, Space Engineers, Rust, GTA etc) they're very CPU heavy, to the point where my game is becoming limited by my CPU instead of my GPU. FX series is very good on overclock, so that's more what I'm worried about. I'll do a bit more testing and see what I come up with. Thanks guys