Question System randomly freezes for a couple of seconds ?

[Zak32]

Hi all,

I've been having random system freezes recently, which only last a couple of seconds, though the freezes aren't always the same. They only tend to happen (or at least I only notice them) when I'm playing a game, or more commonly, while live streaming a game. Sorry for the long post ahead, but wanted to get as much detail as possible into this

My system specs are:
OS: Windows 10 Pro
Mobo: Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero
CPU: i9-10700k
RAM: Corsair Vengence RGB DDR4 32GB
GPU: Zotac 3080
PSU: Corsair CX850M

To explain in more detail, the types of freezes I get are:

• A full system freeze, where video and audio both completely stop for literally only a few seconds, until everything is fine again
• Video freezes, but audio continues to work, again only a few seconds
• Audio freezes, but video continues to work, though in this case, I find that if I'm playing a game, the character I'm playing as will continue walking in the direction I last was, and any inputs don't do anything, until audio is restored again
• A complete audio crash, where the audio will do the usual freeze, and then not correctly restore itself and audio becomes very static and robotic. This is solved by restarting the Voicemeeter audio engine (Voicemeeter may be part of the issue?)

Some other things I've noticed:

• When in VR, it's never video or audio, it's always both. The headset screen goes grey (which is usually what it does when it freezes/crashes) and the audio crashes, making a loud continuous buzz before it restores itself
• When freezes happen, I can see the RGB LEDs in my case flickering, and sometimes can hear my PC sounding like it's restarted itself, like the fans have temporarily stopped and it's coming back on
• Sometimes opening my file explorer takes forever, and sometimes it'll do a mini freeze when it does open, flickering the LEDs again and my PC making similar sounds
• This happens more often when I'm live streaming, which probably makes more sense as that's pushing my PC to use a lot more resources than if I'm just chilling or playing a game alone
• A very specific one, but when I'm live streaming VR, I can't have YouTube open to listen to music on my second screen. The video crashes, as if it's buffering, even if the video is completely buffered. If I move the YouTube window to my main monitor, playback continues without an issue. I've tested this by moving it back and forth the monitors and watching it stop then play then stop then play

If you ask me it sounds like a GPU issue, here's what I've tried so far:

• Completely reinstalling my graphics drivers, using DDU first
• Completely reinstalling Voicemeeter
• Fully updating Windows and drivers
• Typical cleaning things like defrag, disk cleanup, CC Cleaner

I haven't tried testing without my GPU in my PC yet, as it only happens while gaming/streaming, can't do those without a GPU. But I may try it to see if file explorer still has the same issue. It's a tough one because it's random and I use my PC for work, so difficult to test for long periods before I need it again

Please let me know if you have any ideas or have heard of this issue before

Thanks

 

[geofelt]

If the problems are recent, what might have changed since before when all was well?

Possibly you contracted malware.
Or, perhaps windows pushed out a less than optimal update.

 

[Zak32]

If the problems are recent, what might have changed since before when all was well?

Possibly you contracted malware.
Or, perhaps windows pushed out a less than optimal update.

Honestly it's been a while, maybe a few months, but has slowly gotten worse. I can't really remember if anything major happened before I started getting the issue

I haven't actually done any malware scans so I'll give that a try

 

[Padddyy]

Honestly it's been a while, maybe a few months, but has slowly gotten worse. I can't really remember if anything major happened before I started getting the issue

I haven't actually done any malware scans so I'll give that a try

Having same problem, did you fix it?

 

[Zak32]

Having same problem, did you fix it?

Nothing yet I'm afraid. Well, I don't know if it's fixed yet or not as it hasn't happened in the past week. But that's fairly common for me, it can happen a few times a week or not at all

If anyone has any other ideas I'd appreciate it!