Hello people of Tom's hardware. This is my first post so I hope I have this in the proper place.
Recently I've been having a most strange crash occur with semi-frequency. This crash started roughly a week ago immediately after cleaning out my computer. I was using a 120 PSI air compressor with a water/oil filter to clean up the inside of my PC. Immediately after cleaning it out I went about installing a new processor heatsink (a Cooler Master hyper 212 EVO to be precise). The installation went smoothly and I proceeded to boot it up. The computer booted normally and I decided to run Unigine Heaven to help spread the thermal compound. The program ran for 15-20 minutes with no problems and temps were very good across the board. I powered off the PC and went to bed shortly after running the benchmark. This is where the real trouble began. The next day I logged onto the computer and began to play The Witcher 2. The game ran very smoothly and temps were good across the board for about an hour and a half. After around an hour and a half of play time the first crash occurred. The screen went black after flashing pink for a brief moment. It was as if the monitor was no longer getting a signal from the computer. The strange part is the computer remained on with all of it's fans continuing to spin. Pressing the power button did nothing so I cut the power with the psu switch. A short while later I rebooted the PC with no incident. I put a little effort into figuring out what happened and found nothing. At that point I decided to see if I could replicate the crash. I launched The Witcher 2 and sure enough after roughly the same amount of time the exact same crash occurred. At this point i decided to see if the game was causing the problem. I launched CS: GO after waiting a while and rebooting. Interestingly enough the computer crashed right as the game began to load a map. This time the crash was different. The screen was locked and was 100% pink. Like in the previous crashes the computer continued to run. At this point I decided to reseat all the hardware. After doing so everything seemed to have ironed itself out. After running several games for various periods of time with no incident the crash reared it's ugly head yet again. This time while playing Killing Floor 2 the computer crashed to a black screen that would flicker pink intermittently and the fans continued to run as well. After this crash I did some digging and discovered that my HDD had 4 bad sectors. I assumed that this was the problem and went about moving all the important files onto an external HDD. I experienced the crash for the first time out side of a game while copying some pictures to the other HDD. This furthered my suspicion that the HDD was the cause of these strange crashes. After formatting the HDD it reported a clean bill of health in crystal disk info. At the time I happened to have a spare 128 gig Crucial SSD lying around. I decided to do a fresh install of windows 7 with the SSD as my boot drive. I removed the old HDD entirely and installed the SSD. Everything went well with the fresh install for a good while. I installed all the windows updates and most of the drivers with no problems. At this point I started the get the same crash again but this time it would happen for seemingly no reason.The SSD is reporting a 100% health rating on crystal disk info as of now so I'm ruling out hard drive issues as the cause. Currently the crashes are much more frequent and seem to have almost no pattern behind them. The crash is reported by windows event viewer as kernel power error event 41. I've done a little research into this error and it seems as though people with this error have a different problem than I do.
Any help or information would be greatly appreciated.
System Specs:
CPU: AMD Phenom X6 3.3GHz 1100T
CPU COOLER: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
MOBO: Asus Crosshair IV Formula
RAM: ADATA gaming series 8GB (4x2GB)
SSD: Crucial 128GB
GPU: Sapphire R9 290 4G GDDR5 TRI-X OC
PSU: CORSAIR TX750W
CASE: Corsair Obsidian 650D
Things I've tried:
Rebuilding the PC
Running windows memory diagnostic multiple times
Doing a fresh install of windows 7
Picture of internals: http://i.imgur.com/eu7Ejey.jpg
TL;DR: cleaned out my PC. Installed new CPU heatsink. Everything went to H***
Recently I've been having a most strange crash occur with semi-frequency. This crash started roughly a week ago immediately after cleaning out my computer. I was using a 120 PSI air compressor with a water/oil filter to clean up the inside of my PC. Immediately after cleaning it out I went about installing a new processor heatsink (a Cooler Master hyper 212 EVO to be precise). The installation went smoothly and I proceeded to boot it up. The computer booted normally and I decided to run Unigine Heaven to help spread the thermal compound. The program ran for 15-20 minutes with no problems and temps were very good across the board. I powered off the PC and went to bed shortly after running the benchmark. This is where the real trouble began. The next day I logged onto the computer and began to play The Witcher 2. The game ran very smoothly and temps were good across the board for about an hour and a half. After around an hour and a half of play time the first crash occurred. The screen went black after flashing pink for a brief moment. It was as if the monitor was no longer getting a signal from the computer. The strange part is the computer remained on with all of it's fans continuing to spin. Pressing the power button did nothing so I cut the power with the psu switch. A short while later I rebooted the PC with no incident. I put a little effort into figuring out what happened and found nothing. At that point I decided to see if I could replicate the crash. I launched The Witcher 2 and sure enough after roughly the same amount of time the exact same crash occurred. At this point i decided to see if the game was causing the problem. I launched CS: GO after waiting a while and rebooting. Interestingly enough the computer crashed right as the game began to load a map. This time the crash was different. The screen was locked and was 100% pink. Like in the previous crashes the computer continued to run. At this point I decided to reseat all the hardware. After doing so everything seemed to have ironed itself out. After running several games for various periods of time with no incident the crash reared it's ugly head yet again. This time while playing Killing Floor 2 the computer crashed to a black screen that would flicker pink intermittently and the fans continued to run as well. After this crash I did some digging and discovered that my HDD had 4 bad sectors. I assumed that this was the problem and went about moving all the important files onto an external HDD. I experienced the crash for the first time out side of a game while copying some pictures to the other HDD. This furthered my suspicion that the HDD was the cause of these strange crashes. After formatting the HDD it reported a clean bill of health in crystal disk info. At the time I happened to have a spare 128 gig Crucial SSD lying around. I decided to do a fresh install of windows 7 with the SSD as my boot drive. I removed the old HDD entirely and installed the SSD. Everything went well with the fresh install for a good while. I installed all the windows updates and most of the drivers with no problems. At this point I started the get the same crash again but this time it would happen for seemingly no reason.The SSD is reporting a 100% health rating on crystal disk info as of now so I'm ruling out hard drive issues as the cause. Currently the crashes are much more frequent and seem to have almost no pattern behind them. The crash is reported by windows event viewer as kernel power error event 41. I've done a little research into this error and it seems as though people with this error have a different problem than I do.
Any help or information would be greatly appreciated.
System Specs:
CPU: AMD Phenom X6 3.3GHz 1100T
CPU COOLER: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
MOBO: Asus Crosshair IV Formula
RAM: ADATA gaming series 8GB (4x2GB)
SSD: Crucial 128GB
GPU: Sapphire R9 290 4G GDDR5 TRI-X OC
PSU: CORSAIR TX750W
CASE: Corsair Obsidian 650D
Things I've tried:
Rebuilding the PC
Running windows memory diagnostic multiple times
Doing a fresh install of windows 7
Picture of internals: http://i.imgur.com/eu7Ejey.jpg
TL;DR: cleaned out my PC. Installed new CPU heatsink. Everything went to H***
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