• Log InLog In
  • Register
Liquid`
Team Liquid Liquipedia
EDT 09:14
CEST 15:14
KST 22:14
  • Home
  • Forum
  • Calendar
  • Streams
  • Liquipedia
  • Features
  • Store
  • EPT
  • TL+
  • StarCraft 2
  • Brood War
  • Smash
  • Heroes
  • Counter-Strike
  • Overwatch
  • Liquibet
  • Fantasy StarCraft
  • TLPD
  • StarCraft 2
  • Brood War
  • Blogs
Forum Sidebar
Events/Features
News
Featured News
Serral wins HomeStory Cup 2914Serral wins Maestros of the Game 243ByuL, and the Limitations of Standard Play3Team Liquid Map Contest #22: Results and Winners7Code S Season 2 (2026): RO4 and Finals Preview12
Community News
Weekly Cups (July 27-Aug 2): SHIN's big week0SC4ALL II: Brood War - $2500 - Dec 5-64SC4ALL II announced - $10,000 prize pool, Dec 5-63PIG STY FESTIVAL 8.0! (13 - 23 August)9Neeb returns to progaming; rejoins ONSYDE15
StarCraft 2
General
Daily SC2 Player Grid - feedback wanted Weekly Cups (July 27-Aug 2): SHIN's big week August World Ranking: Clem climbs to #2 Balance hotfix patch 5.0.16b (July 16) Life's Huge Gambling Spree After IEM Katowice 2014
Tourneys
RSL Revival: Season 6 - Qualifiers and Main Event PIG STY FESTIVAL 8.0! (13 - 23 August) INu's Battles #19 2-Days Event Sparkling Tuna Cup - Weekly Open Tournament SC4ALL II announced - $10,000 prize pool, Dec 5-6
Strategy
[G] Having the right mentality to improve
Custom Maps
Nexus Wars 2021 GUIDE [M] (2) Industrial Park
External Content
The PondCast: SC2 News & Results Mutation # 537 Hostile Territory Mutation # 536 Railroad Switch Mutation # 535 Assembly of Vengeance
Brood War
General
BW General Discussion Making an Online Broodwar Manager Game ASL22 General Discussion BW Drama: Terror's Debt Incident + C9 disbanding [Personal Project Share] Terran Defense v0.60
Tourneys
[Megathread] Daily Proleagues SC4ALL II: Brood War - $2500 - Dec 5-6 2v2v2v2 Tournament Escore Tournament - Season 3
Strategy
Any training maps people recommend? Fighting Spirit mining rates Simple Questions, Simple Answers Odyssey Mineral Stack Saturation
Other Games
General Games
ZeroSpace Early Access is Now Live! Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread Nintendo Switch Thread Beyond All Reason Path of Exile
Dota 2
Looking for a Dota Mentor Official 'what is Dota anymore' discussion
League of Legends
[TL LoL EUW IHs] Teemo shall perish TSM pausing esports and CLG Dead
Heroes of the Storm
Heroes of the Storm 2.0
Hearthstone
Deck construction bug
TL Mafia
TL Mafia Power Rank TL Mafia Community Thread NeO.D_StephenKing vs This Guy From 1 Million Dance
Community
General
US Politics Mega-thread Russo-Ukrainian War Thread European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread Artificial Intelligence Thread Things Aren’t Peaceful in Palestine
Fan Clubs
The Scarlett Fan Club The IdrA Fan Club The HerO Fan Club!
Media & Entertainment
Anime Discussion Thread Movie Discussion! Series you have seen recently... [Req][Books] Good Fantasy/SciFi books
Sports
Football (Soccer) Thread TeamLiquid Health and Fitness Initiative For 2023 Formula 1 Discussion MLB/Baseball 2023 McBoner: A hockey love story
World Cup 2022
Tech Support
Computer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread Simple Questions Simple Answers FPS when play League Of Legend on laptop
TL Community
Northern Ireland Global Starcraft The Automated Ban List
Blogs
Please support my new stand…
Peanutsc
What is a Gamer?
TrAiDoS
Hello guys!
LIN1s
ASL S22 English Commentary…
namkraft
Poker (part 2)
Nebuchad
Customize Sidebar...

Website Feedback

Closed Threads



Active: 5680 users

Very specific and strange freezing problem

Forum Index > Tech Support
Post a Reply
BrTarolg
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
United Kingdom3574 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-08-01 14:35:03
August 01 2017 14:33 GMT
#1
Hi guys, if anyone can help very much appreciated!

These are my specs:
Operating System
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core i7 4790 @ 3.60GHz
Haswell 22nm Technology
RAM
16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (11-11-11-28)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. H81M-PLUS (SOCKET 1150)
Graphics
ZOWIE XL LCD (1920x1080@144Hz)
S23B350 (1920x1080@60Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (ZOTAC International)
Storage
447GB KINGSTON SV300S37A480G SCSI Disk Device (SSD)

Fairly beasty computer, but having a very strange problem. Occasionally when im playing games, my game will "freeze" for about 1 minute. During this minute, i can alt-tab, my net (and discord+voicechat) still works.

The biggest oddity is if i have chrome open, i can alt-tab to chrome and try to open some new tabs, however when i do this the tabs will just be "loading" and wont show anything (chrome says something about cache, i've tried clearing cache before, idk if it helps)

once the "freeze" is over, everything catches up really quickly and my computer runs as normal.

I think i've had this problem since getting the computer, though it's extremely rare, until i started stressing it out with PUBG/high end games at which point it's happening every day now

A few things that seem to make this occur more often:
- pretty much only when playing games - the higher the performance, the more likely (mostly happening PUBG atm, but has happened much rarer on gwent)
- i think closing things beforehand helps (so not having extraneous stuff running, similar to above)

Additional info:

I updated all my drivers (driver boostered to try to cover all angles)
Use MSE and windows 7. Never had a virus on this PC, scans always come up clean on malwarebytes)

I have a feeling it could be to do with my graphics card, maybe some incompatability with windows 7? (i've seen issues with this specific card 980TI that it might not be using the full amount of RAM on the card, it might show anywhere between 2-6gb of the actual ram or something??) - should i try updating to windows 10?

Reason i haven't updated to wd10 is because i like using classic mode (no aero, no v-sync, means i can windowless fullscreen a lot of stuff with no problems and lag)

Haven't tried disabling MSE whilst playing (maybe it's doing some scans? idk)
Haven't tried messing around with CPU priority

I use displayfusion to manage my multiple monitors, disabled that but it didn't help

---

So yeah, any help massively appreciated. After updating all drivers, trying different amount of stuff being open/not open, checking if it's my network (it's not), the only next step would be to upgrade to windows 10?

I have an (irrational?) fear that WD10 might cause more incompatibility issues with stuff on my computer which is why i've held off upgrading, but idk, all opinions appreciated
Cyro
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United Kingdom20343 Posts
August 01 2017 15:44 GMT
#2
Sounds like it could be a storage drive issue, try clean uninstall and install of older GPU drivers as well. This kind of thing can be awkward to diagnose but i'd personally nuke everything and reinstall win7 before going to 10
"oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
BrTarolg
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
United Kingdom3574 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-08-01 19:20:32
August 01 2017 16:42 GMT
#3
I want to install *older* drivers? regardless i will try a complete uninstall/reinstall of my GPU drivers

When i first installled win7 on this machine it actually came with no drivers... including no network driver (>_>) so i got some driver package online and installed on that. Seemed to work fine except for this hanging issue (it used to actually have network problems where my computer would "freeze" before being able to connect to a network, though now it seems that it just freezes randomly during games)

If anyone has a suggested (ahem) link for win7 install, lmk...

edit:

tried a full uninstall --> install of graphics drivers, did a minimal install (just the driver)

didn't help
Cyro
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United Kingdom20343 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-08-01 19:28:43
August 01 2017 19:21 GMT
#4
Yeah, newer drivers break things sometimes

In the resource monitor - Disk section you can see the queue length on your storage drives, that might spike during some issues. If that doesn't show anything then there could still be a storage drive issue


Even though i have 2 SSD's, OS on SSD, everything set to SSD i get occasional system lock ups for 5-10 seconds because programs inexplicably try to access something on another hard drive which has to spin up. I used to get weird problems like yours for a while before my other ssd died (something would try to access it and a bunch of programs would go unresponsive for a long time before it responded) so that's why i think storage maybe. It could be something else entirely unrelated, i don't have the knowledge to diagnose that
"oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
BrTarolg
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
United Kingdom3574 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-08-01 23:47:49
August 01 2017 22:53 GMT
#5
Alright i'll keep my resource monitor open and see what it does on the next freeze

edit:

alright, so i caught it on the resource monitor, but i still don't know what's wrong

Before it looked like chrome was doing a ton of stuff, but then i turned off chrome in the background to make it empty. The only things im running at that point is pubg and discord

any diagnosis help T__T

idk maybe if it's the way windows can't handle the amount of memory, or i might just need to update to windows 10 and try my luck there

As you can see in the disk monitor, the only thing i saw was that the blue line spiked up all the way to the top. Then after the freeze was over i took a screenshot as you can see

Is it possible i have a faulty SSD? this doesn't happen in normal browsing/work, only when i play intensive games

Or is there something wrong with my graphics card

[image loading]
Cyro
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United Kingdom20343 Posts
August 02 2017 00:22 GMT
#6
Huh i don't even know how to read that

maybe waiting for disk until the blue line drops to 0 again (that line goes up when disk is busy, down to 0 when it's idle)

there's another tab "disk activity" near the middle which you can expand for some more information but this is still just lots of guessing
"oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
BrTarolg
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
United Kingdom3574 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-08-02 15:57:29
August 02 2017 03:34 GMT
#7
Alright i'll try again tomorrow, i'll make it freeze with the disk activity tab open and see what happens haha

[image loading]

well idk.. this is during the freeze, there's actually a massive lack of activity if anything

halp T___T

i don't think there's something wrong with my SSD cause this only happens when i play games, is there a way to monitor my GPU memory?

edit: gonna get GPU-Z and try and monitor my GPU memory. if no bueno then i guess i'll have to update to windoze 10 :-/
BrTarolg
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
United Kingdom3574 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-08-04 00:22:37
August 03 2017 23:32 GMT
#8
Well new update

I had GPU-Z running the whole time to see what the issue is, but then it happened... after i closed my game just browsing the internet wtf >_>

My GPU wasn't being used much at all, so i think that isn't the problem, so i guess it might be my SSD?

Any experts here can shed some light, maybe could i try plugging the SSD into a new slot or something idk?

edit:

had a check in my bios, AHCI was on already (good, but means it wasn't IDE being the problem..)

Then i saw "aggressive LPM" enabled. Since i'm using a desktop, i've turned it off now. Perhaps this might be the fix?

double edit:

So yeah, after searching online, it seems like googling "SSD freeze" exactly matches my problems. So i guess i'll try disabling this LPM, after that i need to update my sata drivers? (never done that before, didn't know it was a thing)
BrTarolg
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
United Kingdom3574 Posts
August 04 2017 14:31 GMT
#9
Ok so, disabling LPM didn't work

It looks like i need to do something with the drivers connecting to my SSD, or i need to downgrade to IDE?

At this point i'm getting into areas where i don't want to screw up my computer, so any advice from someone who knows better (like how to update my sata drivers) appreciated
Device manager thinks it's up to date so idk...
Cyro
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United Kingdom20343 Posts
August 05 2017 02:56 GMT
#10
IDE isn't worth using
"oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
BrTarolg
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
United Kingdom3574 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-08-05 11:44:37
August 05 2017 10:27 GMT
#11
Well what should i do then? I don't see any other options right now and having random freezes throughout the day seems kind of unacceptable

What kind of downsides am i taking on that justify the freezes

edit:

so more research learned some fruit

it seems the asus official drivers actually are no good (according to one anecdote who got the same problems)

tried updating to a new driver using some drivepack software, no idea where it came from but cross fingers
xM(Z
Profile Joined November 2006
Romania5299 Posts
August 05 2017 21:08 GMT
#12
go in power settings/power plan; see the one you're running under and set the HDD's/SDD's to never turn off.
(could also be something hardware related)
And my fury stands ready. I bring all your plans to nought. My bleak heart beats steady. 'Tis you whom I have sought.
BrTarolg
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
United Kingdom3574 Posts
August 05 2017 22:03 GMT
#13
Tried that already

Good news though! Haven't had any issues since installing this new driver!

who would have known that the manufacturers drivers would have bugs like this huh...
Cyro
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United Kingdom20343 Posts
August 09 2017 04:25 GMT
#14
still going good? ;0
"oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
Please log in or register to reply.
Live Events Refresh
WardiTV Weekly
11:00
WardiTV Mondays #98
IntoTheiNu 1432
WardiTV1040
TKL 275
Rex132
Ryung 115
LiquipediaDiscussion
[ Submit Event ]
Live Streams
Refresh
StarCraft 2
Lowko376
TKL 275
Rex 132
Ryung 115
ProTech72
SHIN 21
StarCraft: Brood War
Calm 6694
Shuttle 1700
BeSt 1314
Horang2 1110
EffOrt 933
Soma 771
Soulkey 683
Jaedong 654
Snow 325
Light 320
[ Show more ]
ggaemo 279
firebathero 245
Stork 168
Larva 164
Killer 159
Rush 132
hero 127
Mind 107
JYJ 82
Hyun 79
Pusan 62
sorry 58
PianO 57
Sea.KH 50
ToSsGirL 49
Barracks 46
Sharp 34
Terrorterran 32
Noble 27
Icarus 26
Bale 26
Sacsri 20
soO 18
scan(afreeca) 16
HiyA 15
ajuk12(nOOB) 12
Dota 2
Gorgc10827
Dendi1190
syndereN193
qojqva130
Counter-Strike
byalli811
zeus306
Other Games
singsing1970
B2W.Neo990
hiko608
crisheroes306
Mlord199
Fuzer 192
Liquid`LucifroN179
XaKoH 81
Liquid`VortiX57
Mew2King48
Organizations
StarCraft: Brood War
UltimateBattle 1431
lovetv 11
StarCraft 2
Blizzard YouTube
StarCraft: Brood War
BSLTrovo
[ Show 13 non-featured ]
StarCraft 2
• AfreecaTV YouTube
• intothetv
• Kozan
• IndyKCrew
• LaughNgamezSOOP
• Migwel
• sooper7s
StarCraft: Brood War
• BSLYoutube
• STPLYoutube
• ZZZeroYoutube
Dota 2
• C_a_k_e 2654
• WagamamaTV522
League of Legends
• Jankos925
Upcoming Events
Patches Events
2h 46m
Sparkling Tuna Cup
20h 46m
INu's Battles
21h 46m
Percival vs Zoun
Cure vs Rogue
ByuN vs Classic
Clem vs NightMare
PiGosaur Cup
1d 10h
Replay Cast
1d 19h
Kung Fu Cup
1d 21h
Replay Cast
2 days
The PondCast
2 days
INu's Battles
2 days
Replay Cast
3 days
[ Show More ]
Escore
3 days
IntoTheTV X SOOP
3 days
RSL Revival
4 days
RSL Revival
5 days
WardiTV Weekly
6 days
Liquipedia Results

Completed

ASL Season 22: Qualifier #2
CranK Gathers Season 4: BW vs SC2 Team League
Eternal Conflict S2 Finale

Ongoing

KCM Race Survival 2026 Season 3
K-JUNGMAN
RSL Revival: Season 6
BLAST Bounty Summer 2026
BLAST Bounty Summer Qual
Stake Ranked Episode 3
XSE Pro League 2026
IEM Cologne Major 2026
Stake Ranked Episode 2
CS Asia Championships 2026

Upcoming

Acropolis #5
Escore Tournament S3: W6
Escore Tournament S3: W7
CSLAN 4
ASL Season 22
Escore Tournament S3: W8
Acropolis #5 - TRS
HSC XXX
SC4ALL II: StarCraft II
Kung Fu Cup 2026 Grand Finals
PiG Sty Festival 8.0
Thunderpick World Champ.
ESL Pro League Season 24
Stake Ranked Episode 4
Logitech G Connect 2026
SL StarSeries Fall 2026
FISSURE Playground #5
BLAST Open Fall 2026
Esports World Cup 2026
TLPD

1. ByuN
2. TY
3. Dark
4. Solar
5. Stats
6. Nerchio
7. sOs
8. soO
9. INnoVation
10. Elazer
1. Rain
2. Flash
3. EffOrt
4. Last
5. Bisu
6. Soulkey
7. Mini
8. Sharp
Sidebar Settings...

Advertising | Privacy Policy | Terms Of Use | Contact Us

Original banner artwork: Jim Warren
The contents of this webpage are copyright © 2026 TLnet. All Rights Reserved.