Windows 7 random freezes no BSOD, no numlock, sometimes TDR kicks in, clock freezes

[gregsteg]

This is driving me nuts because I cannot seem to diagnose this problem, I cannot trigger it intentionally and I do not get any report or feedback when it happens. I am thinking of buying a new video card but I'm not sure if it is the problem or not.

System:
Win7 ultimate 64-bit
i5 3570k no overclocking
Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H
MSI GeForce GTX 460 Fermi Cyclone OC 725MHZ 1024MB GDDR5
Corsair TX650W 650W ATX 12V 52A 24PIN ATX Power Supply
Crucial M4 2.5in SATA III Solid State Drive (firmware 040H, one behind current- 070H. thank god I can reboot in a few seconds or I'd be going insane)

Description of the problem:

I get random system hangs, about twice a day that require a hard-reset. Nothing seems to respond during the hang, like the mouse, keyboard, extra volume controls, usb stuff, num and caps-lock lights. Sometimes music or sounds will continue to play for a minute or two after. Sometimes the sound is garbled and cuts out as the freeze happens.

Sometimes there is a "hiccup" where the mouse will freeze, and sound blips, then works again for a few seconds and then a complete happens freeze a few seconds later.

Sometimes there is a "hiccup" and then the screen flashes and I get a win7 Driver Timeout Detection & Recovery message: "Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version xxxxx stopped responding and has successfully recovered" balloon message from the tray. Is this a good reason to suspect the video card?

It often seems to freeze while using firefox, in particular I feel like when I mouse-over something, but maybe this is just what I spend most of my time doing. The computer will freeze overnight as well, I can often see the clock stuck at the time it froze. I cannot recall it freezing while in a graphics intensive game.

This has been going on for about 2 months, there were no major system changes when this started happening, system restore and video driver roll-backs had no effect.

Getting really superstitious now, I can hear slight ticking in my logitech g930 headphones when I move my USB mouse around, as long as I have the headphones plugged in to the USB charger. I can hear this even when the headphones are off, I assume this is just the USB

What I have tried:

I've tried to watch for spikes in temperature around the freezes and have seen nothing irregular. Event viewer does not say much except "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly." Or "The previous system shutdown at 5:16:43 AM on ‎16/‎12/‎2013 was unexpected."

I put firefox as "prefer maximum performance" for power management in Nvida control panel, no effect
I have tried updating and rolling back the Nvidia drivers, no effect.
I switched around which outputs my monitors are plugged in, no effect.
Added more RAM, no effect

Any ideas? Should I hold off on the new video card?

Thanks,

 

[Warrgarbl]

Please check your SSD and RAM for errors. This kind of errors can be caused by data corruption on the HDD (more likely) or RAM (less likely). Use memtest86+ overnight for RAM and maybe HDtune for the SSD, although there might be better programs for SSDs.

Do this please before additional steps are taken.

 

[gregsteg]

Thanks for the reply. Running an error scan with HDtune now (edit: completed without errors), I'll look into other SSD tests and run the memtest overnight.