PC Randomly Freezing

FOTC · January 24, 2020

I've recently started having issues with my pc just randomly freezing. Mouse becomes unresponsive and can't ctrl+alt+del, I have to force a shutdown each time. I did upgrade my ram recently from Corsair Vengeance Pro 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1600 Memory to G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR3-1866 Memory. I'm assuming it has something to do with that as nothing else has changed recently. I don't have a profile in my bios for 1866 as I don't believe my MOBO (ASRock H97M PRO4 Micro ATX LGA1150) supports it so I have it set at 1600, there is no XMP profile. I've also tried changing that to 1333 but it still freezes. I just ran memtest86+ and it found no errors so I'm not sure what to do next.

My only guess is an incompatibility between the motherboard and new ram however according to PCPartPicker they are compatible. Maybe I should check to see if my bios needs updating. Thanks in advance!

RageTester · January 24, 2020

Maybe your 2 RAM sticks are not the same somehow, even though you bought 2 from same store, try disabling dual channel...or maybe motherboard doesn't support so much RAM afterall...

jjbeebe · January 24, 2020

1 hour ago, RageTester said:

Maybe your 2 RAM sticks are not the same somehow, even though you bought 2 from same store, try disabling dual channel...or maybe motherboard doesn't support so much RAM afterall...

Try going back to you old ram to see if it has issues. If the issues persist it may not be the ram.

FOTC · January 25, 2020

4 hours ago, RageTester said:

Maybe your 2 RAM sticks are not the same somehow, even though you bought 2 from same store, try disabling dual channel...or maybe motherboard doesn't support so much RAM afterall...

Thanks for the response. however I am not entirely sure what you mean? They come in a set not purchased individually.

2 hours ago, jjbeebe said:

Try going back to you old ram to see if it has issues. If the issues persist it may not be the ram.

I sold it so not an option unfortunately. Thanks for the suggestion though.

FOTC · January 27, 2020

The problem actually seems to be my graphics card (EVGA GeForce 970). It froze on me yesterday while gaming and received some artifacts. I don't know why the temp is ramping up so much as soon as I turn on the PC when there is no load. It will level off just over 60 degrees. I upgraded the fans recently too so it should be running cooler than ever.