high end pc freezes at random intervals (low load)

Question

BUILD:

CPU: 6770K with water cooling (not OCed)

GPU: inno3D GTX 780 (not OCed)

Ram: dominator 32GB

MOBO: Maximus XIII Ranger

SSDs: 2x 500GB plextor (raid0)

OS: windows 10 Pro

BACKGROUND:

Just built a new pc (only the SSDs and GPU are from my old computer), works fine on Windows 7 until one day the Asus MOBO warned me about some boot security issue. Not being able to start windows at all, I decided to reinstall Win 7. I cleaned the SSDs using another computer, but whenever I entered the installation screen, I was greeted with the "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing" error (never happened before when I first installed). I have tried everything possible: redownloaded Win7, used both DVD and USB, formatted the SSDs , and even tried the "change USB port" method on the internet. Nothing changed. So I tried installing windows 10, and it worked! (used a 8GB USB with the official USB burning tool from microsoft)

However, soon I noticed sudden freezes on my computer, and here are the main sympotoms:

1. CPU at low temp (watercooling duh)

2. low CPU/RAM/GPU load (with both taskmgr and 3rd party monitor apps)

3. network I/O immediately drops to zero, even if donwloading

4. mouse cursor can be moved

5. no immediate responds to both mouse clicks and keyboard, but all actions will "burst" out once the computer unfreezes

6. video playing wont be disrupted

7. CTRL ALT DEL doesnt work (will work once computer unfreezes)

8. happens totally randomly, duration varies, average 10s

9. virus scan found nothing

10. SSDs SMART status normal

11. sometimes during games (i have only tried overwatch on my build so far), video freezes, sounds unaffected. I can open GPU monitors and it shows my GPU process drops to 0. This is not the same with the typical freezes, as I only the game video is affected. This never happened on Windows 7.

In a nutshell, my computer freezes randomly without any virus/application peaking my CPU. Othertimes, my PC is very fast. I suspect it may be the SSDs, any clues or solutions?

Answer 1

The bursts sound a lot like storage problems.

Most OSes today assume that the (local) storage is perfect all the times and if it isn't, they patiently wait until the disk responds. As most processes depend on small disk access, almost everything comes to a halt until the generous timeouts (can be minutes sometimes) are reached.

I would suggest testing another disk to rule this out. Remove your SSD completely from the system for these tests.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue some month back, after a bit of research I found out that the issue was within the "IDE SATA" driver that came with the motherboard.

I uninstalled the specific driver via Computer Management/Device Manager and installed the "Windows standard driver" instead, suddenly the computer stopped freezing.

This was meant as a comment but since I just created this account I don't have the sufficient reputation for it.

EDIT:

Just a curious question regarding your attempt to install Windows 7.

Did you use a USB 3.x thumbdrive for this? I found out that the standard Windows 7 installation media does not include drivers for USB 3.x. There are some "hacks" available online that you can use to manually include USB 3.x driver support into the standard Windows 7 installation media. Worked fine for me.