Windows 8.1 Randomly locks up

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My pc has been locking up randomly since Wednesday. by locking up I mean is all the sound stops, mouse/keyboard does nothing and I have to reset to continue using my pc. I have had no hardware changes for months, I changed my voltages and clock speed (lower) about a month ago. on a side note my friends pc is doing the same thing. no new parts no changes it just began to randomly lock up. I am completely stumped. I tried reading the event log but I cant make heads or tails of what is being said.

specs
OS: Windows 8.1 Pro x64-Bit
CPU: AMD FX-8120 3.5GHz 1.25V
Mobo: ASUS ROG Crosshair V Formula-Z
RAM: 16GB Corsair XMS3 1600MHZ 1.65V
GPU: EVGA GTX 780Ti 337.88 Drivers
Drivers are all up to date
if you can help me solve my problem I would very much appreciate your input
 
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one of the first tings I tried was using default BIOS settings. it has no effect, I still freeze whether it be while I am playing the witcher 2 or laying on my bed while itunes is playing
 
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I thought they might be overheating , however after turning all my fans up and monitors showing normal idle temps it went on to freeze while running nightly and iTunes. My hardware is also fine I doubt I have defective hardware since I have gone about eh 8 months without error since my last hardware change.
 
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yea I clean my PC every week with ccleaner I also (disk defrags I do when I have moved, removed or added lots of data (2x2TB drives I keep my games on one, and the other is for music, pics ect.) I was wondering if it was an issue with voltage. so I went and returned to my old bios settings (4.3GHz 1.35V) and then tried to run IntelBurn Test. that ran just fine, turned of my pc went to bed. woke up today tried to play some league of legends. go through a few menus and it hangs there. the obnoxious part is that it does not freeze during specific tasks it just does it whenever.
 
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johnbl

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a lock up without a bugcheck will be cause external to the main CPU. Most often it will be caused by the graphics driver due to the fact that the driver must work very fast and they the do the minimum error checking and don't catch the hang.
(as far as windows is concerned the graphics driver is responding to windows even if it fails to updat your screen)

as far as causes, it takes some effort to figure it out, most often it will be a driver issue that will require that a new driver be installed. if you have current drivers from the graphics card vendor there are some things you can still do.

- if your graphic card is overclocked, reduce the overclock. if you card vendor overclocks by default you might find that underclocking the card slightly will reduce the number of times you hit the issue. (reduce the memory clock by say 100 Mhz)

- you may also find that if you are not using sound through you monitors that you can disable the graphics cards built in high def sound support in control panels device driver list. it is generally not the cause of the failure but it will change the timing between the driver and the hardware and reduce the chance for getting certain driver failures (deadlocks)

overall, you will not know without looking. Setting certain debug flags in the OS using driver verifier and doing a manual memory dump when they system hangs on you. (forces a memory dump that can be looked at in the debugger)
in the end you will still have to get new driver from the vendor to fix the issue.

 
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my question now is why would the driver decide to give me problems NOW? its been installed for a long while now. I installed it the day it was released. I might try lowering the clocks on my gpu. however I normally dont have issues while playing games. I dont even have the sound drivers installed. (the nvidia ones I use DVI not HDMI so I dont need them
 
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johnbl

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it is pretty hard to tell what is actually installed without looking at a memory dump. windows plug and play will detect hardware and install drivers even if you are not using the device. As to why you are seeing a problem now and not earlier, that is also hard to say. most of the time you do have the problem but you just don't detect it until there are a series of problems. for example, some bugs in the firmware in solid state drives depend which version of the OS you installed, and how you installed it and what you have your various sleep functions set to and are correlated to how much free space there is on the drive. Kind of makes it hard to tell you the cause of problems in short simple statements. You have to go through a sequence of debugging steps to Isolate the problems down and most people want a simple solution. Sorry, I no this is not terribly helpful. Then there are various drivers that are known to cause memory corruption of other drivers, and we are not even talking about software that is trying to hide and screw things over (malware/virus issues)
 
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so if I wanted to use a mem dump to find the issue How do I get it while my pc is non responsive. and If I did get a dump how would I read it? my friend is also experiencing the same thing. just much more frequently so I would like to be able to help him as well.

@Iceclock I have a relatively fresh copy of windows actually I think I installed this 3 mo ago.
 
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johnbl

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how to force a memory dump from the keyboard
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff545499(v=vs.85).aspx

you have to install the windows standalone debugger to look at the memory dump. It is a free download from microsoft
(windbg.exe) you have to configure it to get symbols from the microsoft symbol server, then you can do automated crash dump analysis and you can use commands to look at what is going in the memory dump, (too many commands to easily explain.)

for your problem you would want to also run driver verifer on you system and set some flags so that the system will but extra debugging info into the memory dump (just for this problem) that will make the system crash must faster, when the problem just starts rather than when when it is detected because something really bad happens.

 
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