OS hangs; slowly crashing?

[Kasper_MC]

At random intervals, sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes minutes apart, my OS will slowly stop functioning. Video will keep playing, most often, but mouse clicks will stop working, I can open the start menu, but I can't make it to the "restart" before I can't click anything. If I wait long enough - usually 2-3-4 minutes from when it sets in - my entire OS will have frozen. It won't crash completely with a BSOD or anything - just slowly grind to a halt. 
I know it's not the hardware, all components have been tested long term, seperately in other builds (a mate of mine was kind enough to swap components with me, one at the time). The build is 2 years old-ish. 

I have tried: 
- reseating all components one by one, as well as swapping them
- DDU and install 3 different versions of the GPU driver (one by one)
- updating BIOS and chipset drivers. 
- running without XMP
- running only 2x8 sticks of RAM

Eventviewer at the time of the crash, last time, gives me two errors, none of them critical:
 - DeviceManagement-Enterprise-Diagnostics-Provider
 - ModernDeployment-Diagnostics-Provider (several of these in short succession)
Cinebench, Aida64, 3D-mark Firestrike and Timespy Extreme passes with flying colors. 
It is not overheating; 69-73 degrees on the GPU (Hotspot eround 80-81), 68-70 degrees on the CPU.

My only next step I can think of is to reinstall my OS, but it's a hassle!! - any other things I could try first? 


My build is: 
- Win10, all up to date as of April 3rd. 2023
- Gigabyte Aorus Elite X570
- Ryzen 7 5800X
- Powercolor Red Devil 6900XT
- G.Skill DDR4 3600 cl16, 4x8gb
- Corsair Hx1000 Platinum PSU
- Samsung 970, 512gb Nvme boot drive
- Intel 660p 1tb Nvme secondary drive
- Samsung 850 pro, 500gb backup drive for files

[Eigenvektor]

Have a look at your memory usage when that happens, sounds like you're running out of RAM and the system starts to swap.

 

Likely culprit would be a bug in one of the apps you use (memory leak). So open task manager and sort by memory usage.

[Kasper_MC]

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

Have a look at your memory usage when that happens, sounds like you're running out of RAM and the system starts to swap.

 

Likely culprit would be a bug in one of the apps you use (memory leak). So open task manager and sort by memory usage.

Thanks! I'll try and have TM open and look for it. RAM usages rarely goes above 60% whenever I've monitored it though. 

If it is a memory leak, how do I go about it? Just reinstall or? 

[Kasper_MC]

2 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Have a look at your memory usage when that happens, sounds like you're running out of RAM and the system starts to swap.

 

Likely culprit would be a bug in one of the apps you use (memory leak). So open task manager and sort by memory usage.

Just happened again. TM froze as well, could monitor any change in RAM usage. 
A new error in eventviewer though: Dhcp-Client:A client denied access to a specifik IP. 

[Eigenvektor]

6 hours ago, Kasper_MC said:

If it is a memory leak, how do I go about it? Just reinstall or? 

No. A memory leak is a bug in a specific app, where the app uses more and more RAM until there's none left. There's essentially two options: Report the bug to the developer; update to a fixed version when available –or– stop using the app.

 

5 hours ago, Kasper_MC said:

Just happened again. TM froze as well, could monitor any change in RAM usage. 
A new error in eventviewer though: Dhcp-Client:A client denied access to a specifik IP. 

That should not cause the OS to freeze though. If your system can't get an IP, at worst it can't connect to the network/internet. Not sure EventViewer is going to be any help with an issue where the system is apparently still working, just slowly grinding to a halt.

 

If the system isn't running out of RAM, the only other issue I can think of that could cause this would be a dying drive. You could try software like CrystalDiskInfo, have a look at each drive's S.M.A.R.T info. If there's something wrong with it, it should hopefully be visible there.

[Kasper_MC]

4 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

No. A memory leak is a bug in a specific app, where the app uses more and more RAM until there's none left. There's essentially two options: Report the bug to the developer; update to a fixed version when available –or– stop using the app.

 

That should not cause the OS to freeze though. If your system can't get an IP, at worst it can't connect to the network/internet. Not sure EventViewer is going to be any help with an issue where the system is apparently still working, just slowly grinding to a halt.

 

If the system isn't running out of RAM, the only other issue I can think of that could cause this would be a dying drive. You could try software like CrystalDiskInfo, have a look at each drive's S.M.A.R.T info. If there's something wrong with it, it should hopefully be visible there.

Thanks for sticking with it - help is much appreciated! 

Below is copies of smart data from CrystalDiskInfo. Cmd's Wmic also reads "OK" for all three drives. 

If anyone else has any options I could try - I would like it - otherwise, I'll try a fresh install sometime this week and report back if it work. 
The reason I suspect the OS is the culprit is, that everything is fine if I boot to my textdrive. But as suggested @Eigenvektor - it could be a bug in my OS that I'm not aware of. So any suggestions would be helpful - trying to learn as I go along. An OS reinstall is a shitty job, so might as well get the most tinkering out of it as I can

[Kasper_MC]

Long story short... It's fixed... New OS-install did not fix it. 

It turns out it was my PCI-e riser, not that I didn't check it when testing hardware issues as described; all hardware items has been out, and checked in another PC, that goes for the riser aswell. 
For some reason my bios went back to "auto" mode on PCI-e configuration. Even though it's bought as a "PCI-e gen4" riser, the riser doesn't work with gen4, only gen3 - so yeah. 
Thanks for the input @Eigenvektor - very patient, very courteous with my lack of knowledge. But the fix was just being vigilante against Gigabytes BIOS shenanigans and gremlings...