Potential GPU problems

Faith said:

Ah, ok. I'm not familiar with OCCT, but does it mention what error it reports? Maybe updating the driver fixed this? I'm not sure what else I can suggest other than changing hardware, or reverting drivers way back. You should try and ask on the nvidia support forum if no one else in here have suggestions for you. Since this points a lot towards the gpu being faulty I'm sure someone there can point you in the right directions.

It doesn't specify at all. I asked on another forum about it and they told me to just run furmark and prime95 at the same time to stress the power supply. No crashes/errors from that so they mentioned it seemed unlikely for it to have been the power supply. Somehow it hasn't frozen the couple days after i updated nvidia drivers but i'm by no means confident that i've escaped the problem. I actually made a post of the Nvidia support forum as well on this, and was suggested that my previous driver might've been bad all along and it just took 2+ weeks before the problems showed.

I'd replace thermal paste between your actual video card GPU and whatever it's heatsink/fan is ASAP!

Could be some PSU degradation over time, you don't much leeway with a 500W PSU.

You have good air flow, checked for excessive dust and clean your case fans and CPU heatsink/fan lately?

I'd also pop the video card at the very least and check the contacts on the actual card, you can clean them if dirty with gentle strokes with a clean eraser.

Yeah i'll definitely do a dust cleaning later, while i haven't gotten another freeze *yet* i've definitely been shown the gpu if anything gets fairly hot when under load. CPU seems to remain cool though. 60's at the highest under 100%. PSU degradation i have no idea. I was told over on another forum after posting my logs from the Prime95+Furmark combined test run that my PSU seems good but other than that i'm not actually sure how to best test it.

Welp, 10-11 days without having any issues it randomly froze again. Normal freeze without any screen artifacts. It happened while i was playing a game but it was the instant that i had tabbed back into the game after i was alt-tabbed out. This was with the game running in borderless windowed. I'm starting to wonder if it's alt-tab related.