Tech support request: PC crashes

[Sevaara]

Right, I need some help. Most games I have on Steam (I'd say 70%+) don't work on my PC. I mean, they either crash after 20 minutes or they crash on a loading screen before I get to do anything. Does anybody have any idea why? GTA IV had issues but I sorted that out and it runs perfectly now, Bioshock 2 runs for 20 minutes on full quality before it freezes and closes, CoD:BO2 and MW3 run for 15-20 minutes before crashing completely but my graphics card isn't overheating, my processor isn't having an issue and my PC is generating absolutely no heat at all. Other games work fine but there's a lot that don't. Burnout Paradise crashes on the loading scree before I get to do anything, Fallout 3 just fails completely but I know that has compatibility issues with Windows 7 and Windows 8 so i'm not fussed, Metro 2033 works absolutely fine on max settings, Skyrim runs fine, Hitman: Absolution runs perfectly fine. Then there's the games that run alone and aren't on Steam such as LoL & WoW, LoL has no issues at all, WoW has random crashes but not fatal errors so I have nothing to go off.

I've checked pretty much everything I can and changed whatever I can to fix the issues but nothing is working. Everything is updated fully, my GFX card has been updated fully and then rolled back to October and the problem persists even though the majority of crashes are GFX driver crash related, I've turned off my CPU Turbo because apparently that can be an issue with Bioshock 2, still crashed so I turned it back on, I've updated absolutely every piece of software and every plug-in that is required for any game, you know, the ones that just sit in the background. Nothing is working.

Basic Spec;
i5-3570 @ 3.4GHz
8GB RAM
GTX 660 Ti
Windows 8

Let me know if you can think of any solutions. There are some errors showing in Event Viewer, critical errors but I can't really see anything that might be the cause...

Issues I'm not quite sure about are with the following sources; Kernel-Power and DriverFrameworks-UserMode (The device MTP USB Device is offline due to a user-mode driver crash.)

Update from when I wrote this:

Windows is taking longer to load, Windows is constantly crashing to the point of where CTRL+ALT+DEL isn't working and I have to manually turn the PC off. Chkdsk shows no problems. Graphics Card benchmark shows no problems ( http://prntscr.com/1lmjh4 ).

Also, World of Warcraft is now crashing 4-5 times a minute, screen freezes for a few seconds and then goes back to the normal 160+ FPS.

Any idea what this could be?

[lordmatthias]

I know you said it is not generating any heat, but have you actually checked your temps? You can do this real time by installing Coretemp along with whatever brand GPU utility (I use EVGA Precision) to monitor my GPU temps. Also you should check your event logs to see if you have any errors in both application and system (You should especially check this immediately after a crash so you can find which error is the one that is occurring when the crash happens). Finally, I would run a memtest check (http://www.memtest86.com/) to see if you have some bad RAM that can cause crashing behaviors when something tries to actively write to the bad module. Without more information those would be some good things you check.

You may also just have a bad graphics card, by chance do you have another one you can swap in to see if the behavior persists?

[Sevaara]

I know you said it is not generating any heat, but have you actually checked your temps? You can do this real time by installing Coretemp along with whatever brand GPU utility (I use EVGA Precision) to monitor my GPU temps. Also you should check your event logs to see if you have any errors in both application and system (You should especially check this immediately after a crash so you can find which error is the one that is occurring when the crash happens). Finally, I would run a memtest check (http://www.memtest86.com/) to see if you have some bad RAM that can cause crashing behaviors when something tries to actively write to the bad module. Without more information those would be some good things you check.

You may also just have a bad graphics card, by chance do you have another one you can swap in to see if the behavior persists?

Yeah I forgot to mention the temps properly, I wrote that for a Uni society the other day and just copy/pasted and updated it. I did check the temps on my GFX Card, highest it hit during the Heaven stress test/benchmark was 70 degrees C*.

The problem was Adobe Flash + Firefox, both of them combined were absolutely killing my PC. Uninstalled flash and started using Chrome and everything is working perfectly.

[Yohassakura]

Yeah I forgot to mention the temps properly, I wrote that for a Uni society the other day and just copy/pasted and updated it. I did check the temps on my GFX Card, highest it hit during the Heaven stress test/benchmark was 70 degrees C*.

The problem was Adobe Flash + Firefox, both of them combined were absolutely killing my PC. Uninstalled flash and started using Chrome and everything is working perfectly.

It's probably due to the hardware acceleration of flash, (which is an option within flash player - perhaps disabling could resolve or alleviate the problem) rather than firefox itself. Though, chrome does typically do a better job with its own, built-in flashplayer.