PC Crashing (No BSOD) help needed

Hey guys,

This problem dates back to last year however it seemed to be a rare occurence and when posting about it before I was pretty much told to ignore it unless it happens more often, alas, here I am as it has been happening more frequently recently, below are the exact dates on which it occured:

3rd March 2014
7th November 2015
23rd December 2015
12th June 2016
16th June 2016
24th June 2016
28th June 2016
30th June 2016
2nd July 2016

I'm not sure how to diagnose this crash, because I do not get a BSOD, nor does anything out of the ordinary show up in Event Viewer (just the generic "The previous shutdown at xx was unexpected" after I reboot the system, and analyzing using WhoCrashed finds nothing.

Basically what happens is my computer just freezes up and I'll lose display, it doesn't power off just freezes and loops the last played sound until I turn it off myself. For example if someone says "lol" as I get the crash I'll just hear "lollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll" until I reboot the pc.

Here are the things I've considered/tested so far;

- I thought at first it only happened whilst streaming (using OBS), I have now confirmed however that this isn't the issue

- This crash happens during no particular task

- I ran SSDLife to check it wasn't the SSD, 100% healthy results there

- Due to no BSOD etc, I'm uncertain as to what else this could point at

- I've checked my temperatures, and they appear to be fine (max 80c gpu, max 70c cpu)

- I am not overclocking

- Ran MemTest86 for 5 hours with 0 errors

Here are my system specs

Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz
Gigabyte Z87-HD3 Intel Z87 (Socket 1150)
Seasonic G series 550w '80 Plus Gold' PSU
Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3
GTX 780
Windows 7 Ultimate 64

So far I can only think to format, but as this (I think) dates back to originally building the system, only with it now starting to happen more frequently, I'm not sure whether that would help either.

Any ideas? :S

Try downloading and running Memtest as this could be a RAM problem, leave it on overnight. Or try different RAM sticks or just 1 of your 4GB Sticks.

After that could be PSU/Motherboard issues aswell.

My wife's netbook has the exact same problem at the moment and I still haven't figured out what is causing it.

davewllms said:

Try downloading and running Memtest as this could be a RAM problem, leave it on overnight. Or try different RAM sticks or just 1 of your 4GB Sticks.

After that could be PSU/Motherboard issues aswell.

Click to expand...

Hey,

I've not ran Memtest before and I've just finished doing just that. After 4h 47m it showed that I had 0 errors.

But here's something that makes me curious, does (by default as I didn't change any memtest settings) the test end after a certain stage/amount of passes? Because when I returned to the PC it had been 7 hours, yet the test only ran for just under 5... It also said "Press any key to display summary", but neither my mouse or keboard worked so I just restarted the system. I loaded memtest again, keyboard still didn't work there lol... Loaded pc normally fine though so that's kind of confusing and I don't know if it's indicating that I crashed during that test or not?

Edit: Photo I took of the results http://imgur.com/GDUOTup

Any more ideas?

Would also really appreciate someone who's more experienced than myself with running memtest to let me know whether what I posted indicates that I crashed during the test or not; because that would help narrow this down potentially. I'm thinking it wasn't a crash though, or perhaps just hoping.

Do you have good airflow inside the caes? Those temps are hot for non OC.

They're not surprising temps if the OP is on the stock cooler. My i5 used to get pretty toasty under load until I stuck a better cooler on it.

I've had the same symptoms as the OP before. That particular issue was caused by bad RAM in my case. Memtest spewed out a whole load of errors.

I've also seen it happen with a video driver issue. It might be worth taking out the graphics card, cleaning out the video drivers and running the onboard graphics for a while. If the issue persists, it's not a video card issue.

Yeah, air flow is fine. I've had the temperatures checked before both here and on official site of the products and tems seem fine... I did say their max, idol being cpu 25-35c and gpu 28c. My cpu cooler is the "Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo" and I only hit those high temps in the more demanding games playing at 2560x1440 res on high settings so I don't think that's a problem, also the crash can occur at any time it seems not just during the system being under load

Borealis said:

I've had the same symptoms as the OP before. That particular issue was caused by bad RAM in my case. Memtest spewed out a whole load of errors.

I've also seen it happen with a video driver issue. It might be worth taking out the graphics card, cleaning out the video drivers and running the onboard graphics for a while. If the issue persists, it's not a video card issue.

Click to expand...

As above memtest showed zero errors over 5 hours of running it. As for the gpu, I've had two different cards (technically 5) over the couple of years using this system so I can confirm it's not that (had to RMA 3x r9 280x's, used a gtx 260 in the meantime, and now have the 780) & I install my drivers properly using DDU in safe mode etc.

Yeah, in my case it was bad RAM and video drivers. Your case could be completely different e.g. board failure/PSU issue etc. If you've got a spare PSU handy, try it and see if it makes a difference.

It's been a while since I had to run memtest, but that looks completely normal to me.

No spare PSU to test unfortunatley.

Also, just experienced the crash again. :/ This time I only have Firefox and Skype open, so basically nothing and can 100% confirm it doesn't only happen under load. The crash is always exactly the same as detailed before. No BSOD, nothing in Event Viewer, no motherboard beeps, pc doesn't turn off, just freezes. Fans keep spinning properly upon crash. I've added date of this crash to original post.

Really strugging to think what the cause of this given so little indication of what the problem likely is.

try Rolling back the video Card Driver

ive seen problems with new NVidia .38 driver causing crashes

TheMadHatter said:

try Rolling back the video Card Driver

ive seen problems with new NVidia .38 driver causing crashes

Click to expand...

I'm using the driver 364.72 and given the crash dates back to 2014 across several gpu's/drivers this unfortunately won't be the fix.

It's odd to look at the dates I posted above regarding crashing, too. Could it be indicative of anything? There's literally 20 months! between the crash on 3rd March 2014 and then 7th November 2015, happening once roughly a month later then nothing again for 6 months at which point I've now had it happen four times within a few weeks.

Windows updates?
Have a look under 'recommended' updates and install any that mention system stability/resolving issues in Windows

By all means fully update Windows 7. I somehow doubt that it's Windows related if it's been going on since the system was built. To me it sounds hardware related, but what's causing the issue.

As above, I would agree this is most likely hardware related, did you run memtest overnight? Sometimes memory needs to warm up before it will error out. After ram, I'd test your hard disk, then maybe consider a reinstall of os?

snakefood said:

As above, I would agree this is most likely hardware related, did you run memtest overnight? Sometimes memory needs to warm up before it will error out. After ram, I'd test your hard disk, then maybe consider a reinstall of os?

Click to expand...

Haven't heard of that before but aye, my pc was on all day before running the test. As for Windows it is already fully updated. Currently all I can think to do is to format but have my doubts it would help as you guys said it has always been a problem.

The only hope I do have that it would fix it is the fact that the OS was installed on 4th January 2014 whilst I had faulty ram (constant BSODs) and installed the new ram a few days later on the 7th. Feels like I'm clutching at straws here though as I don't think that should matter?

I've found that Prime95 will pick up memory errors that Memtest misses.

Quartz said:

I've found that Prime95 will pick up memory errors that Memtest misses.

Click to expand...

Just ran this for an hour, no errors or warnings popped up.

is the operating system on an SSD ? or HDD ? i had the same isse a while back i had a 4 month old HDD it was a samsung i think ... and cuz it was new i doubted it and what do you know 2 months after it crashed ..and the HHD you could hear the needle in it clicking

My PC has started doing the same thing since last, Thursday when my power went out during a Windows update update. My crashes are mostly when I try to play a game but 10 mins ago I just rebooted and saw GFE wanted something so I clicked it and then loaded, Chrome and 2 seconds later the cursor froze and alt ctrl dlt etc does nothing.

Whats annoying is that I reset Windows 10 tonight, not reinstall, reset which is basically a rollback to when it first installed and I got a crash testing, Overwatch so I rebooted and did Windows updates and tried, Overwatch again and no crash, usually it's pretty instant. So I quit, Overwatch and installed my sound drivers and on that reboot is when the crash in paragraph 1 happened.

All my temps are fine, my RAM is fine my GPU seems fine. I'm wondering if this SSD my OS is installed on is getting wobbly.