Computer freezes during gaming

[Arctic]

Hi! Found this forum while looking up possible issues with my PC. So I recently (~3 months or so) built a new PC for gaming, and everything went.. pretty well, actually. This month (maybe around late December?) it began to either freeze or crash about 1-2 hours into any kind of game, but extremely intermittently. Now it's just flat out within 10-15 minutes of having a game open. I don't have a huge amount of expertise when it comes to troubleshooting and so I ask... what's going on?

On the advice of a friend I did a clean install of windows as we thought maybe it could be faulty drivers but that didn't work at all. I'm starting to wish this was a bluescreen problem as at least then I would have an error number or something to go by. Is this a heat issue? A hardware failure? I'm completely lost, and will be grateful for any help.

I'm running Windows 8.1, completely fresh install.

 

[wmorri]

Hi Arctic,

Welcome to Sysnative. Since you have done a fresh install, I am going to assume that it is a hardware issue. Can you tell what parts you have in your custom build. Also, are you doing any over clocking or changed any of the default settings in the bios?

 

[Arctic]

i7 4790k
Gigabyte z97 g1 gaming wifi-bk
g.skill sniper 1833mhz RAM
Gigabyte geforce gtx 970 g1 gaming
Samsung 840EVO 500gb SSD
...some kind of older 1tb Hitachi HDD
Corsair ax860

The only things overclocked are the ram and the graphics card, which should be safe. Other than setting the ram to rated speed in the bios I haven't done much else with it yet.

 

[wmorri]

I would start by decreasing the clocking on your ram and graphics card to normal settings and see if you still have shutdown issues.

 

[Arctic]

Well, I feel a bit silly now. I installed a new cpu cooler (was using stock) and... it stopped, everything seems to be working fine. I don't know why it was just locking up (sometimes I'd get half of a bluescreen? just the ": (" and the rest of the message would be cut off so I'd have nothing to search for that) and not shutting down but.. yeah. Heat, apparently.

 

[wmorri]

Glad you were able to figure this out. If you find that you are getting a blue screen come back and we can troubleshoot it.