Question There is a ghost in my computer!

Dec 13, 2020
1
0
10
So... yeah, some weird things happened in the last 6 months with my computer. First things first, I have budget gaming computer, which I've built myself, and it worked really well when I bought the components (march 2018). All of them were brand new, except my GPU which I've bought right when it came out and used it on an older pc. Anyway, since march 2018 and I think may 2020, my computer ran as it supposed to. No problems at all. But then suddenly, I started getting bluescreens, sometimes lag in some games, in which I didn't ever had lag. The bluescreens were more often, until my HDD died (at that time I had a 120GB SSD for windows, from Kingston, and a 1TB HDD from TOSHIBA). I used it a lot. My HDD was always almost full. I used to delete and download huge files. I thought: OK, I know what I've done wrong, but the things got worse. I wasn't even able to use my SSD because when booting, my PC wouldn't recognize it. I don't remember exactly the error and I cannot find anything related to it on internet right now. All I know is after a few SATA port switches it worked. Luckily I had 2 more HDDs from my old PC. I installed them both, not at the same time (one of them was from 2008 I think, but it was still working, both of them were working since I used them recently) and it didn't recognize any of them as well. I was still getting the same error, which was asking me to insert a hard drive(I think so, I'm not sure). One of these old HDDs had windows 10, so I've tried booting without my SSD. It still didn't recognize it. For some reason my SSD was not affected at all. Then I've put back these 2 HDDs in my old system, and... guess what, they weren't recognized as well. Basically my computer just ate 3 HDDs. I thought: OK! I guess they were just... malfunctioning, I'm not that mad at losing all my photos and other data, maybe I'll be able the recover some of it later if I find someone that does this kind of stuff. After a month of using only my 120GB SSD, I've bought a 1TB SSD from Kingston as well. And... it worked right away. I casually installed all my games, played them. Everything was fine... almost. The problem with my PC was that I had only 8GB of ram, and playing Escape from Tarkov for example, was a pain. I was having lag all the time, and my friend told me the same thing, it's because of your ram. He had a laptop with 8GB of ram and after an upgrade to 16GB, the game was running really well. So... I did the same thing. I bought 8GB of ram and it worked really really well... for some time. I didn't change/install/uninstall on my pc. At that time I was just playing Escape from Tarkov. Suddenly when I've entered in a match of EFT, and move around a bit, my screen just went black. I was still able the hear the sound in the game and it looked like I was able to move but my screen was black. After about 15 seconds I've got an error I've never ever had before on this game. It was an error from unity, in which a progress bar was loading, and there is no code or anything else. After the progress bar is loaded the game closes. I've totally ignored this error and reconnected back in the game. I moved around for a few seconds, and then the same thing happened. After that I googled my issue and it seemed like a few people had this error as well, but not the black screen. I wasn't able to find fix for it. At that time I was also playing Phasmophobia with my friends since it just came out. The very first time when I've entered the game the same thing happened. Black screen, was able to move and hear for a few seconds, and then unity crash. After this I was questioning my purchase. I did some searching and here's what I've found out: my first ram stick which I've been using since I've built the PC was running on 1.5V at 3000mhz, but my MOBO was only giving it 1.25V (the default setting of the MOBO, so for 2 years my ram stick was undervolted). The ram stick that I've bought was running on 1.25V at 2666mhz. Both ram sticks are from ADATA (they also look the same). I did some more searching and found out there is a huge stability problem if the ram timings are not the same. I went in bios, and they were the same (CAS latency and all the other stuff, I checked for everything). I've tried lowering the frequency of the ram to 2133mhz (I think), still got that error. I've tried underclocking my GPU in MSI Afterburner, then I've tried running with only one stick of ram(tried them both), I've even tried disabling ram dual channel but none of this worked. At some point I thought my SSDs or just one of them might go malfunctioning because I've got that stupid error again, and tested them both in every single way(I've played these games on each SSD, I've installed windows on each SSD and run these games individually, and I went so far I used a surface test for both my SSDs). As for the ram I used the memtest86 software, and still got nothing. I tried running integrity checks for the games, changed graphics settings to low (I also did a clean windows 10 install on each SSD). Nothing seemed to work. I tried running a benchmark for my GPU (heaven benchmark) and this is where things get spicy. When my benchmark started the screen went black for a few seconds and then it all worked well, like nothing happened. I tried playing League of Legends, which is not made in unity and sometimes when the game starts, my screen is going black for one second and then the image is back but nothing moves (still hear the sound and I can move). What seemed to work is after getting this black screen, I must use Ctr+Alt+Delete and then open task manager, and then the game works again. This sometimes happens when I start the game, or it can happen anytime in the game, or not at all. I've had multiple games in a row when I got no black screen. Sometimes(rarely), opening task manager won't do the trick and I have to sign out and reconnect. Now playing Phasmophobia, or any game, literally any game, there is a chance it may or may not work. There is no visible pattern for this to happen. It doesn't happen when I do something specific, it just happens. Also my fps are the same as before having any of these problems (in League, I don't know about other games but it doesn't seem like there is a difference). Just to give you an idea, a friend of my told me we should play Transformice. You know that old 2D game right? No graphic usage at all. But it did happen. The game just froze(no black screen), I could still hear the sound and move, and again, I had to open task manager for it to work again. I updated my GPU's drivers to the latest from the official website. It did nothing. I tried using "perform a clean install". It did nothing. I even tried installing the studio drivers. It did nothing. I tried installing older drivers. Guess what! It did nothing. Again I did some searching and I found out that "Perform clean install" button doesn't do exactly what it says(oh, and for some reason when I'm installing windows, it automatically installs an older version of the GPU drivers, but I guess that's ok). I used DDU software to uninstall my GPU drivers in safe mode. IT DID NOTHING! But I'm a very calm person so here's what I think. There is a ghost from Phasmophobia in my computer that ate 3 of my HDDs and now every time I'm trying to play a game, the ghost flips a coin. If it's heads, I'm able to play in peace, if it's tails, the ghost will touch my graphics card in a very special way, or it might be otherwise. Also when I'm trying to play Sea of Thieves, if it crashes, the error tells me to update my graphics drivers, and if I'm trying to play this game with graphics drivers from a month ago it tells me the same thing. My friend also had to update his drivers because of this. My monitor is an AOC which is running on 120hz (supporting 144hz, but I guess my GPU is the limitation. I can force it to run on 144hz but then in EFT sometimes some green colors are showing up randomly. This happens only in EFT). I tried on 60hz and nothing changes. Basically this is my only problem now: black screen/freeze. The hard drive recognition error didn't show up anymore (because I didn't make any changes, I guess). I also got the blue screen of death yesterday while playing League. I'm pretty sure there might be a problem with my MOBO/GPU drivers/GPU itself(hopefully not because I cannot afford buying a new one right now). Or there is a slightly chance of incompatibility between some hardware parts. Thanks in advance for help, and I'm sorry if I made any grammar mistakes. Some of this information might not have anything to do with my current problem, but I thought letting you know all the problems that my PC had might help solving this.

My PC specs are:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600x
GPU: Gigabyte GTX 1050 low profile
MOBO: Gigabyte B450M D3SH
RAM1: ADATA XPG D10,8GB,DDR4,3000MHZ,CL16 (OLD ONE)
RAM2: ADATA XPG D10,8GB,DDR4,2666MHZ,CL16(NEW ONE)
SSD1: Kingston A400 120GB SATA III
SSD2: Kingston A400 960GB SATA III

All of this is packed in an old case. The temperatures are normal (CPU: 25C-idle|50/60C-gaming )(GPU: 25/30C-idle|60/65C-gaming)
 
You should cut this post down a bit to only relevant information and with some sort of sentences and paragraphs, it's pretty much impossible to read the way it is. What are the issues here? Crashing in games? Drive not recognized? Did you try a clean Windows setup from a clean formatted drive?