Intermittent Freezing - Please Help

[Brand Name Hero]

I recently gave the majority of my old system's guts to my brother, as I've upgraded. However, his "new" system is now locking up for 5-15 seconds at a time, roughly every 2 or 3 minutes. Nearly everything aside from the PSU & optical drive (brand new) and the SSD & HDD (he had those already) was in my system previously, with no issues. So despite it seeming obvious, I'm disinclined to think it's the RAM.

I'm guessing a driver conflict, since we didn't do a fresh Windows install, just popped in his SSD. Does anyone know a good driver cleanup (find & delete old/unused drivers) utility? Or does anyone have a better idea of what might be causing this?

His system: AMD FX-6100
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX (NOT the R2.0)
8GB Corsair Vengeance 1866
MSI GTX 560 Ti 2GB
Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti 1GB (as dedicated PhysX card, NOT SLI)
Thermaltake Toughpower TPD-0750M
ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS optical drive
Windows 7 64-bit Home (yes, it's legit)

And yes, I did a Clean Install of the GeForce drivers, since nVidia makes that an easy option.

 

[Tradesman1]

Go to the Asus website and download all the latest drivers, install them, then run a rgistry cleaner (Wise has a good free version) - next check if the DRAM is set up correctly - w/ the ST should be able to enable DOCP and select 1866 - prob want to raise the DRAM voltage + 0.05 from spec

 

[Brand Name Hero]

Did all the latest drivers from ASUS site to start with... DOCP already enabled and set. I'll try the voltage increase and reg cleaner. Will pick as solution if successful. Thank you.

 

[Tradesman1]

No worries 😉

 

[Brand Name Hero]

Well, those didn't help, but a fit of pure frustration did. I started taking out components piece by piece, rebooting each time, quite literally yelling "what's wrong with you?!" Once the DVD burner was no longer connected via SATA, problem stopped. Headed back over tonight to see if a new cable will fix it, or if I need to order a new unit. (driver was already new from website).

 

[Tradesman1]

Glad you found the problem, drop us an update

 

[Brand Name Hero]

Apparently the problem reappeared last night even without the optical drive connected... I think I'm going to throw up my arms in capitulation and do a clean Win 7 install. It's really the only thing left that could be causing an issue: the fact that this was installed with drivers for a different mobo/set of hardware.

 

[Brand Name Hero]

Just updating here. Turns out the SSD was failing. Resource monitor was showing 100% Highest Active Time throughout freezings. Usually on HDDs, the BIOS will attempt CheckDisk on every startup, so it's easier to recognize. Not the case with SSDs. I finally clued in when my fiancee's computer started showing identical symptoms, but since she did not have an SSD, checkdisk kept running to give away the HDD as the problem component. Each of them now have new drives and are running smoothly.

Clicking your last reply as solution since I want the thread closed and can't vote my own response. And thanks for your help.