System Freezing occasionly

[cherryrowl]

So over the past week my system has been randomly freezing mostly in more demanding games like The Witcher 3 and Battle field 4, but it still happens in other games and is mostly out of the blue. I'm wondering if this is a Ram issue or maby a power supply issue, I do have 2 different sets of Ram in my system and will take a look at the cheaper ones because they are PNY and well yeah PNY.

My system specs:
R9 290x vapor X edition
AMD 8350
8Gb of Vengeance ram and 8gb of Pny ram
ASUS M5A99X EVO R2.0
750watt power supply
120gb samsung ssd
1tb WD hard drive

 

[wildfire707]

Actually, current games don't need more than 8GB of memory. I would try running just one set of memory first and see if the problem goes away.

You can have problems when running different sets of memory, so I usually check the timings of the memory first and put the slowest/worst timings memory in the lowest bank. Motherboards normally run all memory at the same speed (although UEFI motherboards are getting smarter), so they use just one set of speed and timing information. You can also test your memory by letting it run memtest86 on your system for a few hours.

The version of memtest86 that I recommend is the Memtest86+ version (free / open source). You can find it at:
http://www.memtest.org/

It is an ISO image, so your computer can boot to it and start testing itself.

You can run the test with different memory installed to discover the problem (if it is a memory problem).

 

[Scibbo]

Remove the different memory sets.
your confusing the frequency, cas, voltage and heating on ur ram.
This can damage all your ram and motherboard.

 

[cherryrowl]

Alright, I'll take a try what you mentioned out in the morning and try the software and see if the system crashes any more as it is random.

 

[Tradesman1]

Might be DRAM, could be PSU also, what are the DRAM model #s, they sound like they are working but simply need voltage or timing adjusts, all are running at the same setting (it's not 'confused' as mentioned above and it's not likely to damage anything, other than the system crashing which could corrupt some files, a slight increase in DRAM and MC voltage will prob stabilize all

 

[Uberragen21]

Might be DRAM... (it's not 'confused' as mentioned above and it's not likely to damage anything, other than the system crashing which could corrupt some files...

I would have to agree with Tradesman1, the different memory is likely not an issue. Modern MBs will set each stick of RAM at the same timing, whichever is slowest. If the PNY is slower with higher latency then the Vengeance will match the slower speed of the PNY ram. No harm done to the faster ram, you're just not getting that memory stick's full potential.

I suspect the issue may be your 120 GB SSD if you use that as your gaming drive and boot drive. You may be running into file write saturation where the small capacity SSD has to "take a breath" to clean up (garbage collection) some of the blocks on the SSD. Using a computer is a two way street, there are constantly writes and reads. Though with gaming the reads are much heavier than writes.

If you are using the HDD as your game drive, then you can ignore the last paragraph as it would not pertain to your situation. If that's the case, I would check the event viewer for any errors. To the layman, the event viewer won't make much sense, but Google is your friend.

Another issue could be heat related throttling or freezing. The R9 290x is known to run extremely hot, upwards of 90C. In fact both your CPU and GPU pump out a LOT of heat, so I hope you have adequate air flow. If you can, monitor the temps while gaming and record to a log. The next time your PC freezes check the log. Usually the GPU is throttled when it overheats, but it has been known to cause freezing and stuttering amongst other issues. Not to mention if the heat is saturating your case interior, it can cause your CPU to throttle or freeze or your SSD to freeze. Heat is your #1 enemy.

Final note: it's hard to diagnose an intermittent issue especially without being hands on. I have several years IT experience and intermittent issues that cannot be reliably replicated are very hard to diagnose.

 

[cherryrowl]

Might be DRAM... (it's not 'confused' as mentioned above and it's not likely to damage anything, other than the system crashing which could corrupt some files...

I would have to agree with Tradesman1, the different memory is likely not an issue. Modern MBs will set each stick of RAM at the same timing, whichever is slowest. If the PNY is slower with higher latency then the Vengeance will match the slower speed of the PNY ram. No harm done to the faster ram, you're just not getting that memory stick's full potential.

I suspect the issue may be your 120 GB SSD if you use that as your gaming drive and boot drive. You may be running into file write saturation where the small capacity SSD has to "take a breath" to clean up (garbage collection) some of the blocks on the SSD. Using a computer is a two way street, there are constantly writes and reads. Though with gaming the reads are much heavier than writes.

If you are using the HDD as your game drive, then you can ignore the last paragraph as it would not pertain to your situation. If that's the case, I would check the event viewer for any errors. To the layman, the event viewer won't make much sense, but Google is your friend.

Another issue could be heat related throttling or freezing. The R9 290x is known to run extremely hot, upwards of 90C. In fact both your CPU and GPU pump out a LOT of heat, so I hope you have adequate air flow. If you can, monitor the temps while gaming and record to a log. The next time your PC freezes check the log. Usually the GPU is throttled when it overheats, but it has been known to cause freezing and stuttering amongst other issues. Not to mention if the heat is saturating your case interior, it can cause your CPU to throttle or freeze or your SSD to freeze. Heat is your #1 enemy.

Final note: it's hard to diagnose an intermittent issue especially without being hands on. I have several years IT experience and intermittent issues that cannot be reliably replicated are very hard to diagnose.

I did think it was my temps as both of them were getting pretty hot but I replaced the grease on both coolers and that didn't solve the issue but did lower my temps by 10C so I'm happy in one way.