Computer freezes randomly, need help troubleshooting problem.

[dominicoben]

I've been having this problem since I built my computer back in July, and I can't seem to work out what's causing these problems!

Basically my computer will randomly freeze (in a game, while listening to music, watching a video, working on Word) and I'll have to force reboot. The keyboard and mouse are unresponsive too (caps lock and num lock lights don't light up). Occasionally, the pc will freeze for a fraction of a second then unfreeze, and I notice this happens in games or when on iTunes a lot, as the last second or so of the music playing will hang creating a buzz sort of noise.

My specs:

Intel Core i5 2500K
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
Gigabyte P67X-UD3-B3
8GB Corasir RAM 1600MHz
Palit NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560Ti
OCZ 700W PSU

What I've tried:

-Complete re-installation of Windows 7 (3 times)
-Defragmenting hard drive
-Clearing out registry
-Taking apart and rebuilding the PC
-Run FurMark stress test on GPU for 3 hours. Temperatures peaked at ~80
-Resetting motherboard
-Checking CPU temperatures while stressing computer.
-Memtest86. - First tried with 2 sticks of RAM was fine. Then individually. 1st stick of RAM finished the test, but then started showing random patterns of code on the screen. 2nd stick was fine.

After finding that there MIGHT be a problem with one stick of RAM, I removed it leaving only 4GB, but just a few minutes ago the freezing happened while listening to music. Leading me to think that the problem may lie outside of the RAM,

I forgot to mention that I rarely get BSODs. I've had about 3 since the problem first started (a few days after building my PC).

I'm really stuck here. What can the problem be?
Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[alexoiu]

Hi, Can you test with a different graphics card?

 

[swifty_morgan]

the name Palit sends up a red flag to me. It was one of the 560's I had and what junk it was... ( don't mean to alarm you ).

the back end of the card ( power circuitry ) got way too hot and made the card run like crap. A simple 15 cent heat sink would have probably taken care of the problem but "Palit" is the "bargain" card from ................ GainWard, and I guess 15 cents is too much more to spend.


try under clocking the cards ram and processor and see if you can increase the fan speed.

 

[dominicoben]

I just remembered something that I didn't take into consideration before...The guy I bought the GPU off overclocked it, so this could be a potential problem. I have no idea how to clock it back to "default" though. Anyone have an idea?