I have so far had 4 instances of my PC randomly crashing. As far as I can tell nothing overheated and there was no common action prior to those crashes that would be a clear cause of the issue.
The first thing that happens is that my display would show something like this while the sound on my headphones suggests activity for at least a few more seconds until I just get some weird scratching noise and everything just goes black, despite all lights/fans/etc. in my PC still running.
On the first 3 crashes any attempt at rebooting resultet in no display signal to the monitor unless I tried to fix the problem that I could not identify in some way. What I've done so far is: Crash #1: Clean out PC interior. Unplug the power and hold down the power button for a minute. PC successfully booted afterwards. Ran /chkdsk c: /f /r & Windows 10 Memory Diagnostic Tool with no results. Crash #2: Removed RAM and switched on PC, resulting in continuous short beeps, supposedly signaling a correctly functioning mainboard. Cleaned RAM with a rubber and put it back in. PC successfully booted, no further checks were run. Crash #3: I took the picture referenced above and reset the CMOS with a screwdriver on the 2 respective pins. PC successfully booted afterwards. Ran WhoCrashed resulting in
On Thu 17.08.2017 13:03:46 your computer crashed crash dump file: C:\WINDOWS\memory.dmp This was probably caused by the following module: Unknown (0xFFFFF8031EC07560) Bugcheck code: 0x116 (0xFFFFBE8A1DFC8010, 0xFFFFF80E8574F7F8, 0x0, 0xD) Error: VIDEO_TDR_ERROR Bug check description: This indicates that an attempt to reset the display driver and recover from a timeout failed. A third party driver was identified as the probable root cause of this system error. Google query: VIDEO_TDR_ERROR
(Despite there being 4 of those crashes so far, this is the only crashlog that matches time and type of the issue after checking with WhoCrashed. None of the other 3 crashes seem to have registered with the system logs.) Now this led me to believe that my GPU could indeed be somehow involved since I had some (supposedly) unrelated troubles with my GPU driver in the past. While trying to play games like League of Legends or Dungeon Defenders 2 I would be unable to launch the actual game due to DirectX errors in some form. Back then my research led me to this issue, with fixed my problem for me by running an older driver until recently, when AMD supposedly fixed the issue and I have since been able to freely update my drivers again. Problem here is, though, that there hasn't been any driver update coinciding with the beginning of the crashes on thursday.
I am at a genuine loss of ideas on what to check or do next since I seem to be unable to identify any cause of the issue or even reproduce it on purpose, as there is until now no consistent time of using the PC until a crash occurs nor a specific activity being carried out when it does.
For further information I have uploaded a recent DxDiag but am not allowed to post a third link due to my low reputation. My graphics card is a MSI TwinFrozr R7950 and the older (working) driver used before was 17.3.3 while I am now using 17.7.2.
Thanks in advance for everybody trying to help