What could cause random short & temporary total freezes/pauses on a PC?

achis · January 25, 2021

Hi all,

First post here, excited I must say.

I'm having a weird issue where my PC freezes temporarily (not even mouse moving) for half a second up to almost 10 seconds. It is literally like pausing, It does not produce any BSOD or any logs in Event Viewer, it really feels like a GPU/CPU problem but not sure never encountered this before although I am a technician myself. It does appear to be happening when a bit more intensive stuff happens (even League of Legends) but even then, the issue is infrequent and impossible to reproduce on demand. I've been playing Cyberpunk without this occurring. TEMPs seem ok..

Build is a freshly formatted Win 10

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

i7 6700K

Gigabyte GTX970 G1 Gaming

Samsung 950 M.2 SSD

Kingston HyperX Fury Black 16GB DDR4-2133MHz

And a WD 2TB disk which seems pretty ok.

I do have to state that I usually have 3 displays connected.

Any ideas on what could cause this and how I can proceed with diagnosing?

Applefreak · January 25, 2021

3 minutes ago, achis said:

Hi all,

First post here, excited I must say.

I'm having a weird issue where my PC freezes temporarily (not even mouse moving) for half a second up to almost 10 seconds. It is literally like pausing, It does not produce any BSOD or any logs in Event Viewer, it really feels like a GPU/CPU problem but not sure never encountered this before although I am a technician myself. It does appear to be happening when a bit more intensive stuff happens (even League of Legends) but even then, the issue is infrequent and impossible to reproduce on demand. I've been playing Cyberpunk without this occurring. TEMPs seem ok..

Build is a freshly formatted Win 10

Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI

i7 6700K

Gigabyte GTX970 G1 Gaming

Samsung 950 M.2 SSD

Kingston HyperX Fury Black 16GB DDR4-2133MHz

And a WD 2TB disk which seems pretty ok.

I do have to state that I usually have 3 displays connected.

Any ideas on what could cause this and how I can proceed with diagnosing?

A bad drive will do that. Could be software related as well. HDDs are known to cause hangs like that, a first sign of pending data loss. If it does not happen in Cyberpunk, I would rule out memory as the game need a lot of it. I'd look at both storage drives. Check the 2 TB HDD first. I'd use Seatools and run a deep surface scan. If it locks up, it's the drive. You can try to reinstall the OS but I would make sure to have important data backed up just in case. If it is one of the drives, it could be days or hours until everything is gone.

achis · January 28, 2021

Slow testing all storages with SeaTools did not produce any warnings..

Problem is still happening randomly, it really feels cpu/gpu/mobo related but that's just my hunch.

Was wondering if a not-great HDMI cable could cause this. It's a long fiber HDMI cable (but cheap-ish) that connects to my 4K TV.

achis · January 30, 2021

UPDATE:

I have confirmed it is a GPU/HDMI issue... Not sure if it is the cable, a HDMI switcher I have in between, or the GPU itself.

Yesterday the PC paused for like 30 seconds.

Usually there is a warning period of a few minutes where I witness extremely low framerates before a total freeze. Disconnecting the HDMI cable (while playing from the DVI-D) instantly solves everything and back to 60fps... Reconnecting it starts the degraded performance. I saw similar complaints for the GTX970 while googling but not the same.