PC will randomly 'mostly' freeze on black screen while gaming.

[Arinoth]

I am stating to run out of tests to perform to troubleshoot specifically what could be wrong with my system. My computer will 'mostly' freeze on a black screen while I am playing a video game. Does not matter the game, Tales from the Borderlands, Batman the Telltale Series, Starcraft II, etc. I say 'mostly' freeze as my G15 will still report back status fed to it from MSI Afterburner and whatever game I am playing the audio will keep playing. Aside from that the computer itself is non-responsive and stays as a black screen until I reboot it. It will also happen at random, sometimes within 5 minutes of gaming, sometimes not for hours.
Here are the specs:
• Processor – Intel i7 4930k (Stock, Turbo boost enabled)
• Motherboard – MSI X79MA-GD45 (Bios is V3.8)
• Memory – G.SKILL TridentX F3-2400C10Q-16GTX 16GB 4X4GB DDR3-2400
• Storage – Crucial MX200 1TB SSD
• Video Card – PNY GTX 980 XLR8 Pro OC (run at stock but with a more aggressive fan profile)
• Power Supply - Corsair AX860 860W (I just installed it yesterday brand new to replace an aging Corsair 750W PSU)
• Display Monitor – Samsung LS27A850DS 27IN 2560 x 1440

Tests I have tried:
Memtes86 - Passed on all 4 passes
Prime95 - No issues here, temperatures do not exceed 70C
Furmark Burntest - Temperatures do not exceed 70C

I'm not sure what other tests to try, this didn't start 'happening' until after one of the larger Windows 10 updates late in fall 2016. I have even performed a fresh install of a Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft and still will cause this issue.

 

[YoungMan]

Had this issue before, issue was the GPU memory. As you have an Nvidia card, use memtestG80: https://github.com/ihaque/memtestG80

The official one developed for folding is out of date and has issues, producing lots of false errors. The ihaque dude fixed it and made it open-source.

Here's the cmd parameters:

MemtestG80 [amount of RAM in megabytes] [number of test iterations]

So for example, if you had a 2GB card you would type something like this in CMD:
memtestg80.exe 1680 10

That means it'll test 1680MB of the memory for 10 iterations. You cannot test the max memory because some of it is already in use.

 

[Arinoth]

Thanks for the suggestion, just tried it and it found 0 errors.

I did try reseating the GPU to see if perhaps that is causing the issue, hopefully something as simple as that fixes it. Will report back if it does or doesn't.

 

[Vittra]

Does something like Unigine Heaven run without blackscreen/crashing?

 

[Arinoth]

Well it just happened again. I haven't ran Unigine Heaven yet, just the Furmark Burn test. I'll try it.

Update: Just ran Heaven, no crashes/hangs at all.

 

[sswilson]

Have you tried running it with your fans pegged in order to rule out some kind of overheating? Kinda hard to troubleshoot an issue like this that's not easily replicated though.

 

[Groove]

I had a similar issue in the past, sounds like a driver issue. Are you playing in fullscreen mode or windowed fullscreen mode? When I had this issue while playing fullscreen the screen would go black and couldn't do anything, had to hard reset the pc, but when I switched to windowed fullscreen, I was still getting the crashes but since it was in windowed mode the game would just crash to desktop. I used DDU in safe mode to uninstall everything driver related and installed a fresh copy of the driver afterward and that fixed it.

 

[Vittra]

OP mentioned a clean Windows 10 install, but it does bring up another interesting point - if you are allowing Windows 10 to update your GPU drivers, don't. It can easily corrupt them.

 

[Arinoth]

Have you tried running it with your fans pegged in order to rule out some kind of overheating? Kinda hard to troubleshoot an issue like this that's not easily replicated though.

It's not overheating, I don't even come close to overheating running Heaven or Furmark Burn Test with my custom fan profile enabled.

I had a similar issue in the past, sounds like a driver issue. Are you playing in fullscreen mode or windowed fullscreen mode? When I had this issue while playing fullscreen the screen would go black and couldn't do anything, had to hard reset the pc, but when I switched to windowed fullscreen, I was still getting the crashes but since it was in windowed mode the game would just crash to desktop. I used DDU in safe mode to uninstall everything driver related and installed a fresh copy of the driver afterward and that fixed it.

Happens when it is set to either mode, full screen or windowed fullscreen mode. I've performed driver cleaning as well as this is now a fresh install with the latest nVidia drivers installed.

OP mentioned a clean Windows 10 install, but it does bring up another interesting point - if you are allowing Windows 10 to update your GPU drivers, don't. It can easily corrupt them.

Definitely not the case there either, even checked and it's the correct latest driver from nVidia still installed.

 

[sswilson]

It's not overheating, I don't even come close to overheating running Heaven or Furmark Burn Test with my custom fan profile enabled.



Happens when it is set to either mode, full screen or windowed fullscreen mode. I've performed driver cleaning as well as this is now a fresh install with the latest nVidia drivers installed.



Definitely not the case there either, even checked and it's the correct latest driver from nVidia still installed.

It's not always the measured temp that's overheating, it could be some other component that isn't getting enough air.