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Help identifying PC problem
Lord_Asmodeus
goeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered User regular
goeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered User regular
I've noticed recently-ish (I don't really know how long it's been going on) a lot of my games freezing almost randomly, whether or not they're using a lot of CPU or memory. At first I thought this was because of the games in question as they were often memory hogs and/or had issues like that in the past, but now it's happening even with low requirement games. I'm wondering if this is something to do with one of the Windows 10 updates in the past few months, or if there might be some other cause I'm overlooking.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
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DirectX is baked directly into Windows now. If you open an admin Powershell window you can run 'dism /online /restorehealth' to see if D3D is damaged.
MSI Kombustor I believe should work on non-MSI cards and can stress test your video card.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
CPU/GPU temperatures. Could be a fan gone bad or heat sink detached etc.
Memory/Disk errors. Use the built in tools to check for HDD/SSD errors. Run the memory diagnostic tool. I think Windows has one now (requires a reboot cause uit runs outside of Windows) or you can make a MemTest bootdisk. Let it run several cycles. This may take hours, but sometimes stuff doesn't throw errors in the first pass. Any errors is bad and means you have a stick or slot that can't be trusted. You can try removing/moving some to see if they test better.
Failing mobo/power issues. Harder to test without tools, but sometimes you get stuff going on here that cause hangs like that.
I think you can also set event alerts in the Windows event logs to highlight when there's disk or memory errors, or temps cross a threshold.
Also press Ctrl+Alt+Esc to bring up the Task Manager window. Click on the "More Details" arrow and sort the list by "Disk."
Also, Windows 10 will highlight a given tab as Red if it's pegging at 100%.
If nothing is a clear indicator, click on the "Performance" tab near the top and play your game. If you experience some freezing, Alt+Tab to the Task Manager and see if the Performance graphs show which part is maxing out. If you have two monitors, you can run this in the second monitor to keep an eye on what's happening while you play.
As others have said, it's tough to know for certain without more info, but my thought is your HDD is getting maxed out. Potentially, it could be something like video memory, but I'd doubt that.