Computer freezes with installed graphics card drivers, not without

[Calum]

It's almost impossible that your machine could damage another PSU unless you somehow shorted it, but I appreciate not everyone wants to lend a PSU.  If you're in the UK you're welcome to borrow one of mine - otherwise, let us know whereabouts in the world you are, and we'll recommend some models.

[swiggu]

I live in the Netherlands, unfortunately, so I think I'll just have to purchase a new one. I could also just return my current PSU to the retailer I ordered it from (Alternate) and have it tested there, much like I did with my video card.

[patio]

That sounds like your best next option then...

[Calum]

Because faults like this don't always show up when testing a PSU unless they have some pretty expensive testing equipment (or your system) I would probably go with buying a new PSU.
Looking through the Alternate site (I'm on their UK site because I can't be sure of what I'm reading on the NL site, hopefully they stock the same products) the XFX Pro 550W, Silverstone ST50F-ES, and Antec Neo Eco 520 stand out as good quality, good value for money units.

[swiggu]

Alright, going for the XFX PRO550W Core Edition then. Fingers crossed...!

[patio]

If you are buying from the same shop you got the card from have them hook everything up and run some stress tests on it before you hand them your money...

[swiggu]

Alright, so a week ago I purchased that XFX PSU and replaced it with my old Sharkoon PSU. After almost a week of not having any freezes, it just now happened again. And I was about to come back here tomorrow and post that my problem was solved, too...

I'm really wondering if this is gonna be a one time thing or if it's gonna reoccur. Since I installed my new PSU I've noticed that, even though it didn't freeze, I got these rather unresponsive hangs (especially in Firefox when loading pages or in-game when playing DotA).

Either way, is there anything else I could potentially try out?

[Calum]

Have you already disabled hardware acceleration in Firefox?  If not, do that, it's never worked too well for me and has sometimes caused freezes.
Realistically the only other component that could really be at fault is your motherboard but it's very unlikely to cause a problem like this.
As the 13.12 drivers have been released since your original post, have you tried them, to see if the newer version helps with this issue?

[swiggu]

I haven't. I just did it. I'm not sure if it's gonna fix my system, however, as it occured when I was playing DotA. Firefox was open and running, however, although no video or page utilizing Flash was active at that time if I recall correctly.

I haven't. I bought a new video card, remember (nVidia GTX 660)?

[Calum]

Apologies...I missed that part.
I know the crashes occurred in game as well, I was just checking if it helped with Firefox at all.  Firefox's hardware acceleration is separate to the acceleration in Flash.
Try setting the power management mode in your Nvidia drivers to maximum performance - that's under manage 3d settings in the Nvidia control panel.

[swiggu]

No problem, I'm more than happy and grateful that there's people willing to help me out here haha.

Done. I'll see if I get freezes again now.

[swiggu]

It froze still. Running Speedfan and making it log to see if it's a computer part overheating right now...

[swiggu]

Alright, so the freeze happened again with SpeedFan logging temperatures and voltages, etc. Could anyone help me check out if there's anything wrong with my temps in this? Log attached.

[recovering disk space, attachment deleted by admin]

[Calum]

Well, your temperatures look fine to me too, no problems there.  You can safely ignore voltage readings as Speedfan and other software won't read, for example, your 12V voltage properly.
Is there anything in your event logs, other than that the driver has stopped responding & recovered?

Seems like a very odd and hard to nail down issue, sorry that this is dragging out so long.

[swiggu]

Nope. At this point, I don't even get the occasional GPU driver crash and recover, it's just purely hard hangs/freezes. Other source entries include a lot of "SideBySide" errors, which appear to be DropBox related, "NvStreamSvc", "SNMP", "WMI" and "WLAN-AutoConfig". The error displayed around the time of a freeze is always "Kernel-Power".

Yeah, it's quite odd. And yeah, it's dragging out, but hopefully we'll get there, and I'm very grateful for the help I'm being given.