Windows keeps freezing - how to diagnose the cause?

SBD · 20 Feb 2014 at 20:06

Normally my PC will freeze after playing a game, so could be many hours of playing the game but once I have finished or maybe alt-tab back into windows my PC will become unresponsive. Normally my wireless USB TP Link adapter will loose power when this happens.

I originally thought windows could have been corrupt, I have reinstalled windows 7 but the problem still occurs.

I have tested the following...

Prime95 4 hours of stress test - passed
memtest86 - 7 hours - passed
FurMark - 2 hours passed

My current hardware is as follows:

CPU: i5-3570K
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H
RAM: 16GB (forgotten the brand now)
GPU: AMD 7970 ASUS Matrix Platinum 3072MB
PSU: Seasonic G series 550w
Hard drives:
Samsung 830 128GB - Windows 7 installed
Samsung F3 1TB - games / movies

If anyone can suggest anything else to start testing that would be great. I am feeling very lost at the moment :confused:

Thanking you in advanced!

RJC · 20 Feb 2014 at 20:10

What hard drive does your Windows install use?

SBD · 20 Feb 2014 at 20:19

Ah yes I forgot to add that to the list:

Samsung 830 128GB - Windows 7 installed
Samsung F3 1TB - games / movies

Danny75 · 20 Feb 2014 at 21:36

Do the one-by-one RAM stick test. Play the game for the same amount of time with one stick, then the other.

SBD · 20 Feb 2014 at 22:02

Cheers Danny, I will give that a go tomorrow night....hopefully I can get to the bottom of this

wazza300 · 21 Feb 2014 at 00:22

first be sure to run latest bios

then with 16gb of memory try with 1.10v cpu/vtt voltage
set the pcie base clock manually to 100
set vcore voltage response to fast
set pwm phase control to extreme performance

if its still locking up then try one level higher loadline calibration,maybe medium

can also look in windows event viewer for any whea warnings/errors and click on them to see what caused the latest crash/lock up

SBD · 21 Feb 2014 at 06:40

wazza300 said:
first be sure to run latest bios

then with 16gb of memory try with 1.10v cpu/vtt voltage
set the pcie base clock manually to 100
set vcore voltage response to fast
set pwm phase control to extreme performance

if its still locking up then try one level higher loadline calibration,maybe medium

can also look in windows event viewer for any whea warnings/errors and click on them to see what caused the latest crash/lock up

Thank you for the suggestions.

I will take a look at the bios settings tonight.

My motherboard is already on the latest version of the bios, I had to update this a few months ago for the AMD 7970 to work.

I have been trying to use event viewer since this problem started (1 week ago), but windows is only reporting errors for the shutdown due to it being a hard reboot.

Thanks again!

disi · 21 Feb 2014 at 09:07

Any network drives to be mapped? If you say the USB wireless card turns off, this means no network for you?
It might just wait for some timeouts to finish and the explorer.exe process hangs in the meantime (very common).

Check the power settings for USB devices. Do you use the network while in the game?
Start the task manager and kill explorer.exe, then start a new instance of this process.