Looking for help with freezing on win10

igglez

Honorable
Nov 8, 2015
10
0
10,520
Hi, I've exhausted all options bar a re-format which I don't really want to do and would be grateful for advice.

Around a month ago I built a PC, it's been absolutely perfect up to now, but the last couple of days I've had 5 or 6 occasions where the screen has gone grey, and sound been on a distorted 1 second loop, forcing me to hard reboot. I've checked event viewer, can't see any errors to point to what it is, I've run CPU/GPU stress tests on OCCT, this found no errors, temp is fine. Checked my drivers, all up to date. Other than some games (which I have now uninstalled), I've made no software changes that could have caused this. This has only happened so far when I'm actually in game.

My PC - Win10 (clean install from Win7), i7-4790k 4.00ghz, Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 3 MB, 16GB 1866mhz Hyper Fury RAM, MSI GTX 970, Corsair H40 liquid cooler, Sandisk ultra II 240GB SSD. 700W power supply. Using MB for the sound.

EDIT: So playing in windowed mode I managed to recover from the freeze and got a Kernal mode driver error. Still cant get around it, but its given me new avenues to explore for now
 
Solution
Cooler Master only has a few quality units, and that's probably not one of them. It's relatively new (The v2 unit) but the older v1 was not great at all. I'd be concerned about the quality of that unit, especially, but not only if, it's been in service for more than 6 months. Use of cheap capacitors is probable on these units and the only review I could find on it (Professional review that is) indicates it cannot do it's rated capacity, even when new, and that it repeatedly tripped it's overload protections.

If the replaced GPU card doesn't solve your issue I'd go directly to the power supply as the next most probable source of the problem. If you have not sent the card off yet, or even if you have, I'd test the power supply using the...
I've tried the clean install of drivers and rolled back to a previous version and exactly the same problem. I haven't done the 2nd, but I didn't really give windows any time to update as the first thing I did after install was test & crash my PC. I'm going to send my card back for refund, I'm convinced now its faulty.
 
I wouldn't be anywhere near convinced yet. THE most common culprit in these cases, after drivers, is the power supply. Cheap or low quality units can mimick ANY type of failure a system can have, since everything fails without clean, stable power. What is the model number of your power supply. Should be listed directly on the label on the power supply itself. Keep in mind, about 95% of the power supplies out there are not fit to power a light bulb, much less a discreet GPU card.
 
Cooler Master only has a few quality units, and that's probably not one of them. It's relatively new (The v2 unit) but the older v1 was not great at all. I'd be concerned about the quality of that unit, especially, but not only if, it's been in service for more than 6 months. Use of cheap capacitors is probable on these units and the only review I could find on it (Professional review that is) indicates it cannot do it's rated capacity, even when new, and that it repeatedly tripped it's overload protections.

If the replaced GPU card doesn't solve your issue I'd go directly to the power supply as the next most probable source of the problem. If you have not sent the card off yet, or even if you have, I'd test the power supply using the following method (IF you have access to a volt meter) which won't absolutely tell you if the PSU is to blame, but it will tell you if the unit has clear signs of failure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac7YMUcMjbw
 
Solution
Thanks for pointing the PSU out, not exactly sure how this has happened but I thought I'd try swapping the power connection to another set of PCIe connectors before trying to re-seat my GPU - I noticed one of the power connectors was slightly out of the card. Plugged it in properly and I've been testing for around 30 minutes on a game that crashed in under a minute before and it seems to have fixed the issue, no crashes at all now. Strange that the stress tests didn't cause it to crash out, possibly had the FPS setting way too low & my games were requiring more power.

Thanks again!