Question Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown

[valoryea]

My gaming computer is a (mostly) venerable set of hardware operating since 2012.

• Windows 7 HP
• ASUS P8277-V motherboard
• Intel Core i7 3770
• 2x 8GB Kingston HyperX Savage RAM
• Originally had a Radeon GPU but eventually upgraded to NVIDIA GTX 970 near the end of 2015; the old GPU simply could not render Just Cause 3 smoothly.
• Sennheiser GSP 350 - USB-based headphones with separate audio processor

There is something odd with system build though. I can't remember if this also happened during the Radeon days (likely not), but every couple of months I'd experience audio stuttering and video lag with low frame rate while playing a game. It just lags worse and worse until the computer reboots itself (if not already hung frozen). I note the opening boot sequence stalls for much longer time before the BIOS boot report text appear after those incidents. Feels like a delay waiting for one of the storage devices to respond but I cannot tell which.

When logging back into Windows, it will report the problem was a blue screen error - even though no blue screen was ever rendered on my monitors - and it has somehow "recovered" from the problem.

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 18441

The [Check for solution] button does nothing before just disappearing; offering no information what exactly was the problem and how to possibly resolve it. With other problems Windows will report the device and/or driver that's faulty (e.g. NVIDIA display driver, etc) and thus opens an avenue to troubleshoot said hardware device. In this case here, no hardware is implicated and the "final report" puts me at a loss to pin point where exactly the problem originates. The .dmp file it recorded is binary and I don't have enough software development knowledge at such a low level to make any good sense of the memory contents.

For the better part of the past two years I wanted to half suspect the GTX 970 might be faulty, since the symptoms are stuttering, jerky video and audio. But I don't have any "documented" proof that shows the GPU is indeed the culprit. Furthermore the problem then just seems to dismiss itself casually without any intervention on my part. I'd then have some peaceful months of gameplay, until it surfaces randomly again to destabilise the whole system. It was the same case when I brought the video card last year all the way to the local distributor for a test run which resulted in no problem detected. Subsequently, when I re-slotted the video card back on the motherboard, everything played out fine. And as of now I don't actually see the GPU getting that hot anyway (around 65°C, compared to 80+°C back in the past).

I regularly update the GeForce Game Ready Driver and wonder if certain versions might have bad quality drivers released from time to time?

Has anybody encountered unexplained video/audio stuttering that sends the system into some laggy drunken state that eventually crashes? How would you troubleshoot the phenomena?

 

[valoryea]

UPDATE: And yet again, it seems my computer has gotten over its "period" and is working stably again.

Countdown to the next few months before some sneaky hardware causes the unseen blue screen again.