Freaquent Freezes + GPU problem

[TOExHEAD]

A few weeks ago my PC started freezing and it has been getting more and more frequent. At first it only happened when I left the PC idle(no sleep mode) and I did not notice cause I just used it to look at the time, thought it was 8 am and decided to sleep a bit longer and woke up at 2pm. I pressed the restart button on my PC and thought it was a fluke. It happened a second time when I left it on overnight and woke up to it frozen again. Now for the past few weeks it has happened around 8 times while in use and 2 times in within 3 hours. The CPU nor Graphics cards are overheating, CPU around 55 C under load and GPU around 70. When it crashed recently I looked at my Corsair H100i and I have it on to change color based on temperature and it was around 45-60 C so its not overheating. And when it freezes it does not blue screen, the image on the screen just stays as is no matter how long I leave it and one time when I was watching netflix, the current sound that was playing kept repeating while the later sounds(of the character speaking) happened very slowly with lots of skips and distortion until I presses my restart button moments later. I have had my CPU overclocked since the day I built it and only tried to go higher once, but it was unstable and I went back to what I currently have. And currently I have my memory OC'ed to 1866mhz and believe that may be the source of the issue but have yet to try to revert it back to normal.

 

I have tried to: (cant do system restor cause my only restore point is after the problem started)

-Startup repair

-Updating Motherboard BIOS

-Updating Display drivers

-Full system virus scans (avast free)

 

System Specs:

CPU: Intel Core i5 4670k @ 4.4Ghz

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium

Motherboard: Asus Maximus VO Hero

GPU: AMD R9 280x Gigabyte (side note)

Memory: 16gb Corsair Vengeance @ 1866Mhz

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB

PSU:  Corsair GS800 800w

 

Side note on R9 280X

Often when I am playing games as sometimes when I am not My screen flashes with lines of various repeating colors covering the entire screen and lasting between like a feww tents oif a second or a few seconds, sometimes it freezes with these lines and never recovers. Sometimes when it stops it says it has recovered from a driver crash, sometimes it does not. Sometimes it crashes the game I am playing, sometimes it does not. Sometimes after I do a restart it won't happen till next restart, sometimes it does. Ans I never see any artifacts in game or when running a benchmark with furmark. And the problem with my GPU has only done the line thing once then gone to a bluescreen 3 times when I was a little to aggressive with an overclock.

And another(separate from line problem) thing is that some games like Wallenstein The New Order and Crysis 3 I am running the game at higher but not max settings and am usually under 60fps but it is only using like 3-60% of my GPU, never 99/100%, other games like BF4 do get to 99/100%. And I know that Arma 2 is very un-optimised but it also uses low amounts of my GPU processing power when in game, yet does not achieve 30fps most of the time. I know my CPU is not bottle necking cause my games and processes almost never uses up all my CPU and only experienced some poor performance in BF4 once when some other process was using 15-25% of my CPU.

 

If you require more details on anything else or have suggestions that do not include "re-install Windows" or "Buy a better PC..."  them feel free to comment. 

Attached a DxDiag thingy to this, not very good at troubleshooting but I gave it my best.

[Createinator]

Either your RAM or GPU is malfunctioning or failing. Please run stress tests for at least an hour to check for any possible errors. Memtest86 is a great RAM testing utility. You can use Furmark or Valley benchmark to test your GPU. If both turn out fine, you might need to test your CPU(Prime95) or get professional help in fixing your PC.

@TOExHEAD

[Guest]

Use a better virus scanning software. I recommend malwarebytes, this has happened to my old computer even if nothing was overheating and I later discovered it was a virus, also do what @Createinator says. Artifacts on GPU even if they are rare are a bad thing, and you get lots of "Recovered driver" errors. Try to rollback to an older version and benchmark everything.

[TOExHEAD]

more to add to the GPU issue, the screen does its weird line flash thing, and note the lined cover the entire screen, nothing it viewable through it, they repeat of a lighter and darker shade of 1 color. My card lik most modern cards underclocks itself when not doing anything intensive, when I am not running a game and the lines happen, on MSI Afterburner it shows its jumping from its idle clock at 500mhz to 1100mhz which is its clock when in use on the graph, and vise versa when gaming with the clock at 1100, it falls to 500 and quickly returns and the lines go away. I think it may be an issue with instability with the factory overclock but I don't really want to underclock it cause I will loos like 3-5 frames and that is a good percentage in modern titles that are difficult to run. But even that I think that does not explain the driver crashes, but note the do not happen nearly as often. And as for the artifacts, only ever seen them once, usually when a driver crash occurs it stops the game from functioning, but with older titles such as TF2 it does not, and I only saw one triangle or polygon stretch for less than a second a few times in one match. And not sure if this is considered an artifact but when I bumped my clock to 1150-1200mhz I saw some pixels get messed up and them proceeded to return the clock to the normal factory overclock.

 

As for the Memtest86, I ran the boot and everything seemed fine in the test, till I fell asleep and woke up to a very green display, proceeded to restart worrying that I damaged my system, to the horror that it was still green, but a simple unplug of my main monitor fixed that. I checked my bios and noticed that my memory was never overclock and was at 1600mhz, I proceeded to OC it to 1866 and got errors I soon as I logged and like 0x000000 something which I know is a memory issue and them things started crashing, I did a hard shutdown cause explorer was gone. But after that everything was fine so I do not think it was a memory issue. As for my CPU I have not run any stress tests on it but under load in has never gone over 70C with its overclock. I am not sure if the overclock is really there cause in the Bios it says it is at 4.4Ghz, and in CPU-Z it appears to be running at that when under load, but in things like my system info and tests like with DxDiag it says 3.4Ghz, I am sure that that is just the info on the normal factory setting being displayed but it is worth checking.

 

I will try out malwarebytes and do a scan with that and get back with any info.

 

 

@MarthiniL

 

@Createinator