Hard Freeze during various games plus the looping sound of doom

[sheisty_maestro]

Greetings all, just signed up and have an issue that's been bugging me for quite some time.

First things first, here is my current system:

Mobo: Z77A-G45
GPU: GTX 760 (2GB 256 bit GDDR5)
RAM: 16 GB (4x4 GB DDR3 1866 PC3 14900)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 @ 3.40GHz
SSD: Intel 730 240 GB
PSU: Raidmax RX-730SS
OS: Win 7 64-bit Home Premium
All drivers are current, no overclocking is being done at the moment.

What's been going on is exactly as described in the title, I've had various games hard-freezing on me, starting with Battlefield 4 right after it came out. Built my system specifically to play it, haven't been able to get more than a minute of gameplay in, no matter what mode I tried, unable to change graphics settings due to the game crashing before I could change anything. No amount of uninstalling and reinstalling fixed this. Sometimes it would BSOD, sometimes it would just freeze completely until I reset the system.

Fast-forward to about a month ago, tried getting ArmA 3 and Far Cry 3 to play, ArmA 3 crashes at the main menu, while Far Cry 3 would typically crash after the intro, sometimes during.

I've browsed various threads and encountered many other people encountering the same issue, but rarely come across a de facto fix. I've ran Memtest, found no errors. Also ran Prime 95, encountered no issues either. Today I tried Bad Company 2, and it runs, although I have issues with graphical artifacts and at one point the screen flickered black and returned the normal display for a minute, then went away. Not sure if that's related.

I have at various points tried reformatting and reinstalling everything, to no avail. Results are always the same

If anyone can please help point me in the right direction, that would be much appreciated!

 

[awesomedude911]

its defiantly a hardware problem I think, so I would try overclocking your graphics card. I think if you change the graphics card frequency, it will either get worse or go away. I would try running games with just the cpu also. Raidmax is not the best brand of PSU also which could have something to do with it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/345831-31-computer-freezes-sound-stutters-loops

 

[awesomedude911]

you could get some help form a friend that has some spare parts or a store close to you

 

[Kyee31]

I've been experiencing the same problem with random hard freezes when playing games. Still had freezing when I tried a different GPU,PSU, and RAM sticks. It has come down to the motherboard, CPU, and HDD being the culprits. I have another working HDD that I'm going to do a fresh install of windows on. If that isn't it it's most likely the MOBO. I will get a different brand and model one if that's the case.

 

[sheisty_maestro]

Thanks for your replies, everything I wrote earlier is now a moot point as I finally got ArmA 3 to work by adding a -nobenchmark parameter to the Steam shortcut for the game. A buddy of mine worked me through the process and all is functioning well, in windowed mode at least! *Fingers crossed*

So now he is recommending going through the various preset settings/config files for Far Cry 3 and Battlefield 4 to get them up and running, will appreciate any input on that if anyone already has had experience with that. Thanks all!