Hardware Issue?... Need help trouble shooting Mini PC lock ups

[mr932]

My PC has been locking up quite a bit recently, by lock up I mean maybe a 10th of a second to half a second at the most. When this happens Music playing skips / crackles, all software dose not respond, unable to move mouse.

Now I was having a lot of issues with BSOD recently, tracked the problem down to a bad sound card which I'm no longer using and no longer having BSOD issues but it was after I stopped having the BSOD issues that my pc started doing this.
CPU usage is never more than 30-50% Normally around 15% usage.
Oddly enough if I'm running the cpu at 80% or more it does not lock up any more then if it was running at 10%.

Anti Virus software is upto date and has been scanned with AVG & Malwarebytes. No signs of viruses really.

When my PC does lock up it's because I did something like loaded a new webpage, typing this post... etc. If PC is idle it does not lock up.
PC Specs if relevant
AMD 8 Cores at 4.0Gz stock - FX8355
16GB GeIL DDR3 1333MHz
Win7 ultimate SP1 fully upto date.

[mr932]

Could this maybe be a CPU issue? I don't know why but It kind of feels like that's what could be causing this.

[Geek-9pm]

No, CPU is the less likely cause. (Some rare exceptions.) This kind of behavior is more often subtle memory failures.
By the time  your  system is up and running, the CPU has gone thorough several Billion  machines cycles. But during that time the memory has been through a a few hundred cycles, or even less.
http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/m/memtest.htm
The above link is about memory testing.
Which will lead to this link:
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000708.htm