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I built my parents computer back in mid-September. Its specs are as follows:

  • Radeon R9 200 series-
  • 8GB of DDR3 RAM
  • Intel i5-4440 3.1GHz Haswell processor
  • 650w PSU (If you need the maker I'd be happy to fetch it for you, I just can't think of it off the top of my head)
  • 1TB HDD
  • 256GB SSD (I think Sandisk, though I'd have to go back home to check)
  • Windows 8.1, legitimately purchased

It ran great for a few months, but in the last week has developed an odd bug: Every few hours spent in a game will lock it up. The game stops, sound stops, and the only way to turn the computer off is to hold down the power button.

But this ONLY seems to happen in games. I can leave it on and browse the internet for as long as I want, but an hour or two playing games causes a lockup.

I've updated as many drivers as I can think of, but still problems. Memtest86+ has turned back 0 errors after 2 passes, but I will run it for another several. I ran a comprehensive benchmark on it to see if it failed, but it passed spectacularly. Temperatures seem completely normal under load: around 50c on the processor, 85-90c on the gpu, and <40 on the hard drives.

There seems to be nothing in the event log, except the expected Kernel Power Failures and Unexpected Shutdowns from holding the power button in.

I've ran verifier.exe, but no errors were thrown.

Any ideas? I'm a little lost.

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  • It sounds like overtemp. Gpu fan and cpu fan may be dirty. Try to clean with a compressed air tank.
    – maudam
    Dec 28, 2014 at 21:19
  • Really? The temperatures seemed pretty normal, as stated near the end of the post. Which seems high? Dec 28, 2014 at 21:22
  • Did you get the same result with more than 1 game? Have you done a chkdsk /r on the hdd? Did you test with 3dmark or furmark to see if error occurs sooner than 1 hour with an intense benchmark?
    – cybernard
    Dec 28, 2014 at 23:24
  • I've been getting the result in Guild Wars 2, The Sims 3, and Dark Souls. All three fail at random times. I'll run a chkdsk /r just to be sure, but I really believe I've ran it on both hard drives. I tested it with a benchmarking tool that I really can't remember. I'll report back in about an hour with a 3DMark benchmark. Dec 29, 2014 at 1:26
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    @maudam I ran it for 3 hours, CPU never got above 70c and the GPU was just as fine. Dec 30, 2014 at 1:56

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