Question PC freezes and crashes, hard reset required?

[azthechamp]

I have an EVGA GTX 960. It is a year and a half old. Basically I will be gaming or watching a video, and it will usually get really sluggish, like freezing and unfreezing randomly. Then eventually it just completely freezes and whatever noise is playing at the time of the freeze just distorts to an infinite glitched ear rape sound. Then if I do nothing the pc will restart itself. It boots on integrated graphics (shitty resolution) and says in device manager - display adapters that my 960 "has problems detected so it stopped working (code 43)". I have updated drivers, deleted them, reinstalled them etc... It wont help. This does not happen immediately I could play for 5 hours with no problem OR it happens after 30 minutes. It is completely random. But if I hold down power button and hard restart it always fixes it instantly. Device manager says my GPU is fine drivers = fine. But then I am just waiting for it to do it again. Idle GPU is like 50 Celsius and while gaming is like 57 Celsius. Any idea how I can fix this or what is causing it? Performance is fine before crash but then the glitches start happening and a minute later the PC is frozen. Sometimes it will just freeze/crash with no prior symptoms. Seems to be only when I am watching videos or gaming but that could just be coincidence.

 

[rgd1101]

full system spec? include make and model of the psu

 

[azthechamp]

full system spec? include make and model of the psu

Windows 10 Home 64-bit OS

Intel Core I7 6700k @ 4GHz Skylake 14nm Tech CPU

Gigabyte - GA-B150M-D3H Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard

Western Digital - Caviar Blue 1 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive

EVGA - GeForce GTX 960 2 GB SuperSC ACX 2.0+ Video Card

Asus VG248qe 144hz monitor

Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ---- Although in speccy it says "8.00GB Single-Channel Unknown @ 1066MHz (15-15-15-36)"
Idk if that is a problem or a problem that could be related to my issue. Or if that is just a mislabel.
Edit* Ok so only 1 slot out of 4 is being used, despite me having 2 seperate 8 gb ram sticks in right now. Guess I will have to take a look inside and re insert them cuz that is abnormal. Still has nothing to do with my problem I thinK?
Edit** Ok I fixed the ram its on the dual shit now and i have all 16 gbs, maybe that will fix my shit. No crash yet after 1 hour but we will see

EVGA - 600B 600 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply


Also all other temps are fine for everything and I never had errors for anything else in device manager besides display adapters.

 

[azthechamp]

Also I mistyped idle GPU is 40 celcius and gaming is between 50 and 60 celcius. Fan might turn on once in a while for a few seconds

 

[knickle]

...Idk if that is a problem or a problem that could be related to my issue. Or if that is just a mislabel.
Edit* Ok so only 1 slot out of 4 is being used, despite me having 2 seperate 8 gb ram sticks in right now. Guess I will have to take a look inside and re insert them cuz that is abnormal. Still has nothing to do with my problem I thinK?

Faulty RAM will absolutely cause major stability issues. Yank the RAM and try with just one stick at a time.

 

[azthechamp]

Faulty RAM will absolutely cause major stability issues. Yank the RAM and try with just one stick at a time.

Yeah so what was happening was, I had 2 8 gb sticks, and they were in the right slots, but one of them was not snapped in all the way. So it was only using 1 8gb stick. And the other was just kinda there but not in all the way. Dont know how I didnt realize. But I replugged everything and now it says 16 gb 2 slots up and running and the dual mem is working fine. I just dont know if it will fix my original problem because specifically my display adapters (gpu) were getting the error after the crashes. So I thought the GPU must be the real issue?