FPS Drops and Prime95 stress test freezing my computer

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Bl00dyBizkitz

Commendable
Jun 22, 2016
3
0
1,510
My Build:
AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz 8-Core Processor
PowerColor Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB Video Card
G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory
Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard
Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Corsair CX 500W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply

I've been using my computer to play games recently, mostly a lot of Overwatch. I noticed the temp would hit around 70 C and cause massive FPS Drops (from about 70 to 20) and then crash the computer, so obviously it was overheating. I decided to buy an aftermarket cooler (Cooler Master Master 212 Evo) and thought that would be the answer. I installed it and it definitely reduced temps while I was playing Overwatch, down to around 50-60 C, but the FPS got EVEN WORSE. It would chug around 30-40 FPS the whole game, which was never a problem before. I did some research and thought a stress test would tell me if something was wrong with the CPU. Well, every time I run a Prime95 stress test, the computer freezes. I did further research on what this means and ran memtest to see if there was anything wrong with my memory. After a 16 hour test, I got 0 errors back.

Anybody have any clues as to what's going on? Is it the memory or CPU? I'd just like to get this fixed, hopefully without having to replace every single part on this thing.
 
Solution
T
Get into BIOS. Reset to defaults. SAVE. boot. This will clean up any bad settings around voltage, memory timing, etc.

Suggest you underclock the CPU down to around 2GHZ and see if everything runs slowly, but stable. If not then you need to do full debugging. This could be memory, software, etc.

Most BIOS allow you to reduce max clocks. IF not then windows power policy allows you to set the max CPU frequency.

If PC is stable when underclocked then start to increase clock rate until you start to lose stability. If you find it's stable at a slightly lower than normal frequency then you can either live with it or start swapping components like CPU and MB.

GL
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Bl00dyBizkitz

Commendable
Jun 22, 2016
3
0
1,510
Update on this:

The computer is now freezing whenever it likes apparently, not just during stress tests or playing Overwatch. It'll just freeze when I'm watching videos or I'm on idle.
 
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T

tsnor

Splendid
Nov 20, 2008
3,702
2
24,965
Get into BIOS. Reset to defaults. SAVE. boot. This will clean up any bad settings around voltage, memory timing, etc.

Suggest you underclock the CPU down to around 2GHZ and see if everything runs slowly, but stable. If not then you need to do full debugging. This could be memory, software, etc.

Most BIOS allow you to reduce max clocks. IF not then windows power policy allows you to set the max CPU frequency.

If PC is stable when underclocked then start to increase clock rate until you start to lose stability. If you find it's stable at a slightly lower than normal frequency then you can either live with it or start swapping components like CPU and MB.

GL
 
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Solution
B

Bl00dyBizkitz

Commendable
Jun 22, 2016
3
0
1,510
Alright I reset BIOS to all defaults, that seems to have stopped the random freezing.

But now I've noticed a different problem, Windows only has 4GB of Memory usable, even though I have 8 installed.

The msconfig trick hasn't worked and neither has re-seating the RAM into different slots. I tried booting with each individual stick and both have worked so far, so I'm guessing the memory isn't corrupted. Could be wrong.

I'll try maybe updating the BIOS or something else to get the computer to use all 8GB of RAM.
 
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T

tsnor

Splendid
Nov 20, 2008
3,702
2
24,965
"But now I've noticed a different problem, Windows only has 4GB of Memory usable, even though I have 8 installed."

Sorry for asking a stupid question, but can you verify windows is 64 bit version ? (right click your computer icon, properties, look for 64 bit). 32-bit can only see a bit less than 4GB (it can only address 4GB, and some of that is used for PCI memory mapped IO).

Assuming 64 bit and dimms are there then we need to look at reserved memory for video card. I don't remember how to do this, so if it's video hopefully someone else will jump in or hope we can find it via google.

 
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