RedScud

It seems as if it was the PCI WiFi causing the freezes. Extremely weird. That problem solved, yesterday I was having dinner and I hear a faint pop coming from my bedroom. I went there and the motherboard had absolutely no power at all. I believe my fabulous NZXT Hale82 V2 550W PSU bit the dust after 2 weeks. Catching no breaks lately.

Ok CPU stress tests did not come back with any errors. I went to the BIOS and set manually the memory to 1600 (which it is), enabled APM and Cool n' quiet. Im attaching a pic of all the system stats as reported by AMD OverDrive. I can't understand why the clock is now at 4200 mhz. I did not touch any OC options other than setting the memory to what it was supposed to be (Auto would set it to 1333).

I reset everything to optimized and left it like that, the processor runs at the normal 3.6 GHz. RAM should be 1333 if I'm not mistaken and it's running like that. Haven't checked XMP, isn't that Intel only?

So I bought some used parts from a trusted friend - Motherboard ASUS Sabertooth 990, AMD FX 8150 and 16 gigs of Corsair DDR. To make all that work I bought a NZXT 550W 80+ Bronze power supply, and a 1TB WD caviar blue drive where I installed Windows 10. I already had an MSI GTX 950 from a previous computer, so I used that. After setting it all up in the case (NZXT S340), the system was working fine. I also replaced the CMOS battery so all settings went to default. Entered BIOS and set up optimized values. My friend told me he used to work with it on the "performance" EZ bios setting, which sets the processor to 3900 mhz, which is the turbo boost value, all the time. So I went in and clicked that setting. Other than that, it has a couple 120 mm fans, a PCI WiFi card from TPLink (which I am aware of, is not very good), USB mouse and keyboard. Downloaded latest drivers directly from nVidia, and to test the system I downloaded World of Tanks. I was playing normally, great performance all around, not dipping under 60fps, and then all of the suddenly after maybe an hour, the screen and sound froze and my heart dropped... I hate these kinds of problems with very vague symptoms and no error messages. I cursed and then rebooted, started playing again, and this time it happened in less time than before. Third time, I barely got through one single match. Gave up on playing the game altogether and ran FurBench, checked my components temperatures with HWMonitor. The GFX card is not going over 65º C. Then ran Prime95 to torture mode, the CPU is not going over 40, 45... so it's very likely it's not a thermal issue. Ran both stress tests at the same time for a little while and the computer is not freezing up like it did in game! Nevertheless I started changing things up in BIOS, I didn't actually overclock the CPU or memory before hand, just tried the Performance mode like my buddy suggested. My suspicions lie on the power supply. Is 550W not enough for this system? The graphics card is not a power hog, it even has a 6 pin connector going to it. I also doubt the card is bad, it ran without problems for a year on that previous PC. Anyway I would like to hear opinions/steps to try/suggestions on this.