First of all sorry for huge wall of text. I'm at a loss and need assistance.
So I built this right around Dec/Jan this year. Everything was going fine for the most part. Now within the past 2 months I've been having some issues with the pc completely freezing up and having to hold down power button to shut off pc as the reset button does nothing when it freezes.
At first this was mostly happening while playing games and when it froze the audio playing at the moment of freeze would be looped (i'm guessing) and sound like a very loud buzzing. Using MSI Afterburner this didn't seem to be a temp issue for CPU or GPU (GPU never even reached 70.) It's very random too, it could happen after 45 seconds or 3 hours while in game. Then it also started to happen while not gaming. No specific thing seems to trigger it. Could happen while browsing or even when no programs running at all.
Ran Memtest86 and all checked out good.
I did a fresh install of Windows, but still happened. When I got the 970 it worked fine, but occasionally when I would turn the monitor back on the screen would be, I guess pixelated would be the best term for it. Sometimes would take a reboot or 2 to fix. Was random and rare so didn't worry too much about it. So I took the GPU out and used the on-board video while I waited for 1070 to arrive. Only crashed once in the week while I waited and that was when I tried play Bastion using the Intel 530 on the CPU. Stopped gaming for the week and no crashes. So figured was failing GPU.
1070 arrived slapped it in and also applied new thermal paste to CPU and reseated RAM while I was in there. Also did another fresh install with new Windows 10 Anniversary Update ISO. Had a freeze or 2, but nothing like it had been doing previously. Disabled the on-board sound and used USB Sound Blaster Omni 5.1 and now had several crashes last night while browsing.
Haven't had any in game freezes (currently playing Dishonored with DSR 3840x2160 @144mhz) since changing to 1070 (knock on wood), but still getting some here and there, just less frequently than before.
The Q-Codes I've seen the last 3 times it has frozen are 99, FF, 04
What do I test/replace next?
Power supply? Motherboard? CPU?
Any assistance is greatly appreciated.
