Question PC completely freezing with buzzing audio from speakers

[akuratsula]

I have recently been having an issue with my PC in which it completely freezes, even what's displayed on the monitor, and a loud buzzing sound comes through the speakers. I primarily use my computer for video/picture editing or flight simulation, and it only ever freezes when I am using it while the simulator application (Prepar3d v4.4) is running. The issue I have with finding out why it all of a sudden began freezing is that I upgraded multiple things at once in between uses. Among these, I installed a new 4TB HDD, upgraded windows to the latest update, upgraded my graphics card driver, connected a new Bluetooth headset, and installed some pretty shoddy software to direct audio to a different source (to quickly change audio outputs with the new headset). Since the crashes began, I have upgraded my graphics card driver and windows again (both had a new update), I uninstalled all of that shoddy audio software, fiddled with power management settings, uninstalled/removed any unused audio devices from the device manager (someone did that with a similar issue), and finally removed the new HDD to still end with a complete freeze. Every time that I used the simulation software, this would occur.

Then, finally last week, I opened up the PC to remove dust, and clean ports, to find a small speck of packaging plastic that had slightly melted onto a small metal piece of the GPU, which I then removed. I then went another week without a crash, using my computer roughly 3-5 times, something that wouldn't of ever been possible before.

But, this ended today when the PC crashed again, and that led me to write this now... Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

PS: I did have this issue when I first got my PC from CyberPowerPC about 3 years ago, and read somewhere about dialing down the CPU's maximum power in the power management settings to ~85%, which I did, and didn't have this issue again until 3 years later.

I have an Intel i7-6700K, a GTX1070, 1 SSD and 2 HDDs, all powered by a EVGA 650W PSU. Running Windows 10.

Finally, as a side note in case component temperature is at fault, installing the third HDD has restricted quite a bit of space for air to pass through the shelves of hard drives and to the PSU.

UPDATE: Just after posting this, I read somewhere to update my BIOS driver, which I did. I'll update if that worked.

 

[Karadjgne]

Have you tried going to the motherboard website/support and downloading all (that means all) of the latest chipset drivers for audio, Lan, USB, Sata etc. You wiped out every single one when you reinstalled windows so the only thing your mobo is running on is generic windows chipset drivers, which often are not very well optimized for performance on your mobo.

 

[akuratsula]

Have you tried going to the motherboard website/support and downloading all (that means all) of the latest chipset drivers for audio, Lan, USB, Sata etc. You wiped out every single one when you reinstalled windows so the only thing your mobo is running on is generic windows chipset drivers, which often are not very well optimized for performance on your mobo.

So, its been a month. After following your suggestion, my computer seemed to stop crashing. For about 2 weeks I went without crashing, except each session using the Prepar3d application was quite short. So, I decided to let it run longer a couple days ago, and about 2 hours in it crashed. Started it up again, and crashed about 30min later. Both involved a full PC freeze with buzzing audio.

I read up on it again and began question my PSU, except that nothing changed with my PSU when the crashed began. Then I questioned my GPU. So, I opened up my PC to do a deep clean with the GPU especially, nearly cleaning out all of the dust and opening it up to further clean it (while also replacing the thermal paste). Due to minor mistakes when plugging back in the RAM, I realized how easy it is to not plug in the RAM all the way and remembered that I removed the RAM for the first time prior to the start of the crashes (about 3 months ago) when cleaning out the dust when installing the new HDD. It may have been possible that for the past 2 months I have been running on just 16GB of ram (half of what I have) with the second "module" not fully plugged in.

Now, my question is, if it is possible that I may have failed to fully plug in one of my ram modules (both are 16GB DDR4), would have that caused such symptoms or crashes as described?
Thanks!