Computer Freezing Problem

[Navelol]

Hello! I am currently having the strangest problem I have ever seen.  About 2 weeks ago, I had a problem with my computer where it would randomly restart.  It just started happening and then wouldn't stop.  It would even do it in safe mode.  I eventually just ended up taking it to a repair place and had them look at it.  At first, they told me that it was my C drive that was causing the restarts so I bought a new SSD and replaced it.  Loaded the same windows on to it and was able to keep most of my files.  However, about an hour after plugging it in, it started restarting again, and was even worse than it was before.  It eventually got into a state where it wouldn't boot up anymore and just blue screened every time you wanted to load it up.  Took it back to the repair place, and found out that it was the motherboard that was acting up.  Before, I had the ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero installed and replaced it with the ASUS Prime Z390-A.  

 

Here's where my main problem comes in.   When replacing the motherboards, I didn't have the cables I needed and just ended up using the same ones that were already attached to the power supply.  Essentially, I just took out the Maximus and dropped the Prime in there without changing any wires at all.  For the most part, it seems to work, but I’m unsure if I’m missing cables or have attached certain cables to wrong things.  I just wanted to mention this in case it was important.  Anyways, the repair place tried to fresh install windows but failed because the computer kept restarting.  This left me with a corrupt copy of windows that wouldn't download.  My mom ended up helping me reinstall windows by going into the registry and changing a value from 1 to 3.  Which miraculously fixed it.  Windows wasn’t activated and couldn’t be recognized because of the motherboard switch.  I wanted to update the inactivated version of windows home that was already on it.  However, during the restart process, it kept freezing during the download.  It was unresponsive and wouldn't move even if you left it for hours.  We ended up having to restart the computer multiple times just to get it to update.  After that, we bought windows pro and assigned it to the computer, but as it was upgrading to pro, it kept freezing.  Which led to us having to restart the computer multiple times just to get it to upgrade and download.

 

I didn’t think much of it and just used my computer like it was normal, thinking that it must’ve been a windows thing.  However, I was wrong.  While using my VR headset, it froze on me, just like it did when it was updating.  When it freezes, the entire PC freezes and can’t be fixed without turning it completely off and back on.  It does this after about 1-2 hours of use, but I’ve had it go as long as 3 hours without freezing.  The only times I’ve had it freeze were while I was playing VR (VRChat) and using Adobe Photoshop. 

 

One possibility that I could see it being is that a component might be overheating and causing it to freeze.  I only say this because after installing the new motherboard, the fans aren’t running nearly as fast as they were with the Maximus.  If you have any idea what this could be then please let me know.

 

Current Specs:

CPU – Intel® Core™ i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz  3.60GHz

Ram – 2x Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GB DDR4 DRAM 2400MHz

Motherboard – ASUS Prime Z390-A Motherboard LGA1151

GPU - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition

Water Cooling - Hydro Series™ H150i PRO RGB 360mm Liquid CPU Cooler

Fan Count – 6 (Not including CPU fan, GPU fan, etc.)

[Radium_Angel]

9 minutes ago, Navelol said:

freeze

If it's a hard lock, then it's a hardware issue.

Test RAM with MemTest86.

Report back.

[The_russian]

11 minutes ago, Navelol said:

One possibility that I could see it being is that a component might be overheating and causing it to freeze.  I only say this because after installing the new motherboard, the fans aren’t running nearly as fast as they were with the Maximus.  If you have any idea what this could be then please let me know.

What are your temps for the CPU? You can use a program like HWMonitor to check. If they are fine, I would do as suggested above and do a memory test.

[Navelol]

On 3/17/2020 at 2:23 PM, Radium_Angel said:

If it's a hard lock, then it's a hardware issue.

Test RAM with MemTest86.

Report back.

I have ran memtest and it comes back that I don't have any errors with the ram.

[Navelol]

On 3/17/2020 at 2:25 PM, The_russian said:

What are your temps for the CPU? You can use a program like HWMonitor to check. If they are fine, I would do as suggested above and do a memory test.

My temps for everything is fine, the only thing that gets any sort of hot is the GPU, but it hasn't gotten any hotter than 75 degrees C.

[The_russian]

3 hours ago, Navelol said:

I have ran memtest and it comes back that I don't have any errors with the ram.

Your motherboard should have 4 diagnostic LEDs, do any of then stay lit? If you have not tried it yet, try leaving only the necessary components, (psu, motherboard, cpu, one stick of ram, ssd, and keyboard). If you are still having the issue after using just the minimum hardware, it sounds like a defective PSU.