PC locks up at various stages of use, mostly games.

For a few months now, I've been experiencing lockups and since this pc is mainly used for online play, it can get very frustrating. There have been times when the pc is idling and same thing. I've tried thermal paste, formatting hdd with DBAN, cleaning, removing Creative sound card, and am at a point of replacing the hard drives. Today, I finally buckled and am seeking help in hopes of pinpointing the problem. Other things I thought of trying was resetting cmos and replacing ram sticks...but the repair bill is getting to steep at this point. Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated, and thank you in advance. Specs are as follows:

cpu: amd fx 9590 8core (small liquid cooling unit)
mobo: asus rog crosshair v formula-z
gpu: amd radeon rx470
ram: corsair vengeance 8g x4
psu: (not sure, will have to open case to check)

Before you try anything else, set the fan on your GPU card to "Manual" and set the fan to run at about 65%. Radeon cards (in my experience - that means every one that I have ever owned) notoriously undercool when set to "Auto". This causes lockups and black screens.

As for idling and locking up, I'm not too sure, but the GPU trick will help with the gaming.

The fan's auto setting was pretty weak even when temp started to go up, max fan speed was set for 79% on it. So, it's at 70% manual and it seems to be doing ok for now. I'll post if anything happens in the future. Thank you for this advice, I never would have guessed lol.

Your sure there is no overclocking done on the unit? Overclocking with the wrong voltages can cause all sorts of random lockups and reboots.

I'm not really sure as I bought the whole setup from someone. How could I check for this?

Lockups are usually caused by heat. Changing your GPU fan settings to manual and upping the fan speed like you did will probably solve your issue.

Hello everyone. I did the fan speed change and it lasted for a about a day before lockups started again. I gave up and left it alone this past week, staring at the new hard drives now and then. Last night I changed both of them out to find out that the old ones were a decade old lol. I'm in good spirits about this one as it's been almost a couple days without any signs of it happening. Thanks everyone for the insight and have a good day!

zackers said:

Hello everyone. I did the fan speed change and it lasted for a about a day before lockups started again. I gave up and left it alone this past week, staring at the new hard drives now and then. Last night I changed both of them out to find out that the old ones were a decade old lol. I'm in good spirits about this one as it's been almost a couple days without any signs of it happening. Thanks everyone for the insight and have a good day!

If you still have problems I would reset the BIOS to defaults and start from there.