Windows Hard Freeze, possible PSU problem?

[aarinc]

Hello everyone,
I'm new here so I apologize for anything I do wrong ahead of time.
About a year ago I built my own PC and just recently started having seemingly random hard freezes on my Windows 8 system.
Here are the specs

Gigabyte GAZ68-UD3 Mobo
Core i5 2500 Sandy Bridge CPU
Antec BP550W PSU
1TB Western Digital Black Drive (for music, movies, etc.)
128 GB Samsung 830 SSD (for OS)
8GB (4X2GB) sticks of GSKILL ripjaw series 1600
Nvidia GTX 660 ti
Rosewill RNX-N300X PCI Wireless Adapter
Also I have a Seagate 1.5 TB external and USB keyboard and mouse.

I noticed the hard freezes (by that I mean no CAPS lock on the keyboard) happening after I removed my AMD HD 6870 card due to a failing, noisy fan and started using the onboard graphics (not sure if that helps at all). Sometimes the freeze would happen when the computer was sitting idle for awhile and other times (like earlier today) it did it after i ran a windows assessment with my gtx 660 ti (I was able to re run it with no issue). I ran memtest for awhile and saw no errors but did not do individual sticks. My system temps seem ok, nothing out of the ordinary for the cpu and when it's crashed I haven't noticed anything abnormally high. I've researched this issue quite a bit and done things like chkdsk and the scannow test but nothing seems to have really worked. I've updated all my drivers and my BIOS is up to date except for the UEFI update which I heard was an unnecessary update anyway. So I decided to come to you guys. Could it be a failing PSU or mobo? I think I have enough wattage as most PSU calculators put me somewhere around 450 to 500 recommended. What do you guys think? It's driving me nuts!

 

[jadag]

Don't know if this will work for you but I have been battling for 6 months with Vista freezing when idling.

I read somewhere that my power sirrings (in Control Panel) may be swithching off my hard disk after idling for a while so I set all my power plans to "never switch off" when not on battery and it solved my problem!

Good luck

Jadag

 

[ikameozero]

did u uninstall the old Gpu Driver Before putting in your new card did u actually go to device manager and do it ?

to go to device manager go start menu right click on my computer go to properties then go to top left of page device manager then go to display adapters there should be 1 file in there

example mine has 6990 delete it by right clicking then uninstall if there's 2 of them uninstall both and tick delete driver software for this device then reboot pc re install your current driver that might fix it thumbs up if i helped you thanks gl

 

[ikameozero]

oh and because u have new card make sure you have your power settings as high performance in the power options in control panel

 

[ikameozero]

you probably did all what i said already but just putting it out there message back im interested to see how you fixed this

 

[aarinc]

thanks for all the replies. it turned out to be a faulty etron usb 3.0 driver. I had updated from the motherboard manufacture website and then needed to update it device manager again. The freezes seemed to stop after that.