[Ichirou]

Define "freezing." Can you alt-tab out of the game, or does the entire PC freeze and force you to hard reset?
Your answer will vastly change the diagnosis, as there are different kinds of freezes.

If it is the former, and if it's just one game, then it might be a game issue. If it's any game and there are no crash errors, then your VRAM is struggling.

If it is the latter and your PC itself completely freezes, your CPU (and the IMC and RAM) is the issue, and would need further diagnosis.

 

[Ichirou]

Thanks for the reply, its really hard to replicate or I haven't found a consistent way to replicate it. So for example I'm in a game, I alt-tab out and the freeze will happen, the system will stay in a frozen state for up to 5 seconds then come back to life. Other times the screen will go black, which in my mind is a bit like a GPU driver crash however it does come back. So no full crashes requiring a reboot.

Its not every game, just some (not all the Vram is getting used either, and I can even make it happen when just doing mundane things like browse the web, YouTube going. I recently replaced the CPU so I don't think its that. In terms of Ram, I've done a Memtest and Prime95 with lots of ram seems stable, both with and without XMP enabled.

As I mentioned there are so many people reporting this crash and seems rather generic, others have replaced the GPU same issue, along with other parts. But its a minefield to work out what is related and what's not. I can run Furmark fine, 3D mark and temps are good and shows as stable. Its very intermittent, i found some comments saying very old drivers 2023 no issue and since a driver upgrade it started happening to people, but clearly not everyone is affected by this.

I do have a 7700XT sat next to me, so it will be interesting to see if I get some stability and hopefully rule out anything else in the system.

Does you play games in exclusive fullscreen? Does the game resolution settings match that of the monitor/Windows?
In those two particular cases, it can sometimes require the OS to take some time to "adjust".

The reason why I bring up the CPU is because sometimes overclocked CPUs and RAM can cause the exact issue you're pointing out with the freezes.

As for black screens, that's typically the GPU or PSU. A driver crash and reset can cause the screen to go black and eventually return. An unstable GPU can do that as well.
If you want to simulate a driver reset, press Ctrl + Win + Shift + B. Try it and let me know if it seems similar to what you experience.

 

[Ichirou]

So world of warcraft (off memory) was Fullscreen windowed, and other games were full screen and yes I play them at the same resolution as my monitor 1440p.

Does Ctrl + Win + Shift + B. work for all GPU drivers AMD, Nvidia and Intel? I'll give it a try, thank you for the advice

Fullscreen and windowed can't happen at the same time. Did you mean fullscreen borderless?

That keyboard shortcut works for NVIDIA GPUs, I'm not sure about the others. Can't exactly check since I only have an NVIDIA GPU.