Long story short:
My PC is running Win 10 and freezes pretty much every time it's idle for a bit.
However, I've stayed home playing for several days and haven't experienced a single freeze while it is active.
I was hoping to get some input and get some fresh ideas.
Symptoms:
-System freezes (ONLY) when idle and requires a hard reset.
-To reiterate: it does NOT freeze when it is in use (not idle)
-Event logs only show abnormal restarts, no errors or warnings before that.
Specs:
OS: Win 10 Pro
CPU: Intel i7-6700k
Motherboard: Maximus VIII Hero
RAM: 2x4GB (3000Mhz) set by Corsair, setup to run at 3000mhz
HDD: (???) Somewhat old seagate 1.5TB, Sandisk Pro 240 SSD (Used only for games)
Graphics: Asus Strix GTX 980 Ti
-----External Hardware------
External Audio: Asus Xonar U7
Keyboard: Corsair RGB k65
Mouse: Razer Ouroboros
BIOS: Latest (at this point) with default settings without overclock, except for RAM frequencies and timings.
A short list of solutions I've tried that did not help:
1. Clean boot.
2. No Asus AI suite (although I do have the sound driver that comes with Asus sonic suite)
3. Disabled sleep, screen shutoff, hard drive stops shutdown ( and anything else I could find) when idle.
4. Disabled PCI power saving and USB suspension.
5. (Edit 1) Disabling all C-states for CPU in bios.
A clean install of windows 10 seems to have eliminated the problem, but at some point after getting the drivers back in freezes came back.
My list of suspects:
- Windows 10 (obviously) - because it's new product and I don't think I had freezes before upgrading (going to install Win 7 just to confirm)
- Gameguard - I've seen or heard it cause pretty much every "common" system instability in the book on some PCs. I'm playing a game that has it, although I'm getting freezes without actually starting the game.
- BIOS - It has lots of settings I didn't really mess with. It might be a power related option...
- Motherboard/Graphics card drivers - this is one of the suspects because as I mentioned, I don't think Win 10 froze without drivers.
- Keyboard - I doubt it's causing this, because I've tried shutting supporting software down with a clean boot. Then again, It was 1 of the things I didn't have on the clean Win 10 that didn't freeze.
It's rather sad, really, a ton of "expensive" consumer hardware and it can't handle being idle....