So I have been using an APU system(detailed specs at the bottom) for about 6 months and never had issues with it. Recently I borrowed my friend's old GPU, a Sapphire HD 7770 1GB D5 (this one http://www.sapphiretech.com/productdetial.asp?Pid=A14177C9-2709-4553-913F-F60364824EAF&lang=eng ) and have had freezing issues since then. The system would just randomly freeze, no keys nor mouse clicks worked and I had to manually power it down, and wait for a couple of minutes before it could boot back up. I tried troubleshooting myself and had some progress but the issue has not been completely resolved.
At first the system froze really quickly and randomly like 3-4 minutes into gaming, sometimes when I was simply browsing through my BIOS menu and once in the middle of re-installing drivers. Initially I thought it was because my Integrated Graphics had not been properly disabled yet and thus the iGPU and dGPU were conflicting. Sure enough, both GPUs showed up in the AMD Catalyst Control center and iGPU was set to 'Force' in BIOS. I disabled it, used DDU to do a clean uninstall and then re-installed drivers for the HD 7770.
The problem seemed partially solved as the system no longer froze until I was 10-15 minutes into heavy gaming. Performance seemed to noticeably improve as well(15-25 fps). So my next step was to clean the card the best I could(it was really dusty), wipe off the fan blades and the heat sink etc. and set up a Custom Fan curve through MSI Afterburner so as to run the fan at 100% when temps approached the 70s.
Then I ran Furmark GPU stress test and AMD Overdrive stability test simultaneously and observed that the GPU ran upto 89 degrees and after hovering in the high 80s for a minute it froze. Thus it seemed to confirm that overheating was the culprit.
However, yesterday while gaming for about 50 minutes, I was monitoring temps through Afterburner OSD. Temps did reach 84-85 but system was fine. And yet when it did freeze around the 50-minute mark, the GPU temp read only 73 degrees.
So now I am a bit confused as to what really is causing the system freeze. Any help to narrow down the cause or provide a solution would be highly appreciated.
I have tried clean re-installs of drivers but to no avail.
My system:
AMD A8-7600 Quad Core,
2×4GB Corsair 1600 Mhz DDR3 RAM,
Gigabyte F2A68HM-S1 motherboard,
Antec VP 550P PSU (bought only a week ago),
Toshiba 1TB HDD,
Sapphire HD 7770 1GB D5
Windows 10 64-bit
Games that froze: Assassin's Creed Revelations, Assassin's Creed Black Flag.
At first the system froze really quickly and randomly like 3-4 minutes into gaming, sometimes when I was simply browsing through my BIOS menu and once in the middle of re-installing drivers. Initially I thought it was because my Integrated Graphics had not been properly disabled yet and thus the iGPU and dGPU were conflicting. Sure enough, both GPUs showed up in the AMD Catalyst Control center and iGPU was set to 'Force' in BIOS. I disabled it, used DDU to do a clean uninstall and then re-installed drivers for the HD 7770.
The problem seemed partially solved as the system no longer froze until I was 10-15 minutes into heavy gaming. Performance seemed to noticeably improve as well(15-25 fps). So my next step was to clean the card the best I could(it was really dusty), wipe off the fan blades and the heat sink etc. and set up a Custom Fan curve through MSI Afterburner so as to run the fan at 100% when temps approached the 70s.
Then I ran Furmark GPU stress test and AMD Overdrive stability test simultaneously and observed that the GPU ran upto 89 degrees and after hovering in the high 80s for a minute it froze. Thus it seemed to confirm that overheating was the culprit.
However, yesterday while gaming for about 50 minutes, I was monitoring temps through Afterburner OSD. Temps did reach 84-85 but system was fine. And yet when it did freeze around the 50-minute mark, the GPU temp read only 73 degrees.
So now I am a bit confused as to what really is causing the system freeze. Any help to narrow down the cause or provide a solution would be highly appreciated.
I have tried clean re-installs of drivers but to no avail.
My system:
AMD A8-7600 Quad Core,
2×4GB Corsair 1600 Mhz DDR3 RAM,
Gigabyte F2A68HM-S1 motherboard,
Antec VP 550P PSU (bought only a week ago),
Toshiba 1TB HDD,
Sapphire HD 7770 1GB D5
Windows 10 64-bit
Games that froze: Assassin's Creed Revelations, Assassin's Creed Black Flag.
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