PC regularly hangs - usually with a buzzing sound in speakers if sound was playing

[madaxesalob]

Over the past couple of days my PC has started hanging regularly. It occasionally did before but at completely random intervals pretty spread apart which started occurring ever since I upgraded to Windows 10. I believe this to be a separate issue to the one that I am troubleshooting here, however I think it is worth mentioning.

I started noticing the issue after I had moved my rig, had it running for a few minutes and then had a fuse blow in my surge protector. When I restarted and loaded up WoW the issue began - however I wasn't doing anything long enough on my PC previously that day to see whether the fuse going was a cause of the problem.

The freezes are most reproducible when playing World of Warcraft - after about 3-5 minutes in game if it even gets past the loading screen that is, however they have occurred watching videos, and once playing Rocket League online for about ~15 mins. I have played CS:GO and Rocket League free play mode for about the same lengths of time and didn't experience a crash.

I am forced to hard reboot, and often i will experience a hang immediately or a few minutes after rebooting even if there are no open programmes. Edit: WoW is now telling me it needs an update and I can't complete the update without the PC freezing.

The issues started before I upgraded my GPU and PSU earlier in the week so I would rule these out as being the issue. I have checked the temperatures on my CPU which maxed out at about 80 Celcius during gaming (about 50 avg.), and I have run Memtest86 for 9 hours with no faults found.

Today I reinstalledmy OS (over the top of the old version) and WoW and the same problem ocurred - an additional note I was previously running my OS off my SSD and most programmes including WoW off my HDD but I installed both the OS and the game on my SSD today.

I'll leave my system specs below, but basically I'm running out of ideas and old threads that detail similar problems!

BIOS: BIOS Date: 02/26/16 10:44:44 Ver: 04.06.05 (type: BIOS)
Motherboard: Gigabyte 970A-DS3P
Processor: AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor (8 CPUs), ~4.0GHz
Memory: 32768MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 32726MB RAM
Page File: 3630MB used, 34214MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 12
Display Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
PSU: EVGA Supernova 750 G+

 

[colinski283]

Do you happen to have an intel 7260 wireless adapter?

 

[Karadjgne]

That happened to me. Turned out to be a conflict between my old legacy audio drivers and windows update. I'd try visiting the motherboard support for drivers, if they are kinda old, then visit the Realtek support.

 

[madaxesalob]

Do you happen to have an intel 7260 wireless adapter?

No, I'm actually using a wired connection as I have no onboard wireless functionality.

 

[madaxesalob]

That happened to me. Turned out to be a conflict between my old legacy audio drivers and windows update. I'd try visiting the motherboard support for drivers, if they are kinda old, then visit the Realtek support.

All of my drivers are fully up to date (downloading the latest version rather than just what Windows Update tells me).

 

[madaxesalob]

Update: booted using just my HDD and Windows 7 that was installed on it, it worked smoothly no issues. Then booted using just the SSD (Win 10) and immediately it hung updating WoW.

So it's either a Windows 10 issue or an SSD issue. Most likely the latter.

 

[colinski283]

Windows 10 has been a constant issue for me as well. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was bad or conflicting updates. Search for windows update troubleshooter and run it. I bet it find a bunch of errors to fix.

 

[Karadjgne]

Windows update only updates windows. Nvidia only updates the gpu. I was talking about the motherboard drivers like USB family, Sata controllers, audio and Lan drivers which get wiped out with any windows reinstall, replaced by newer, generic windows drivers which inevitably conflict with x64 OS, like win10, which if the OEM version has no x86 support, only the full version will have x86/x64 (32bit/64bit) support, meaning windows will be trying to use 64bit drivers on 32bit components. Which doesn't always work, especially with lan and audio. This started happening a lot after the original Creators update, so unless the motherboard drivers are relatively recent (2017+) then they'll balk at times. For audio you'll need to go directly to Realtek website, for lan I'm not sure.
You may also require the most recent bios update on that mobo too, which will include fixes for Vista and possibly 7,both of which had 64bit varients, win XP was mainly 32bit, most common OS when that board was released.

 

[madaxesalob]

After everything, it was the audio driver.
I tested them on a fresh install with both rolled back drivers and new drivers from Realtek with no effect.

I then decided to try plugging in my external sound card and my headphones into that, and since then I've had no issues.

Obviously that's not the ideal situation as it only has XLR input not 3.5mm mic input so my new headset is gonna need a usb adaptor to make the mic work, but at least I'm back up and running.