Not Sure If OS, Or Something Else

[Sovereign]

Symptom: Computer locks up (no mouse/keyboard response), but audio keeps going and it fails to reset itself (I've left it alone for 5 minutes like this). The system clock seems to be frozen/stopped as well. Forcible power down does NOT produce anything in the event log other than the usual "System shutdown unexpected."

Temperatures are NOT excessive on either CPU or GPU (40C/50C).

Attempted Remedies
- CHKDSK / DISM restore (errors were corrected in the latter case)
- Clean install of GPU drivers

OS: Win8.1 x64
The rest of the system is under Play [H]ard in signature.

 

[B00nie]

Start with the 32 gigs of ram. Remove all but one stick and see if problems continue. 32 gigs is already pushing it on some consumer motherboards.

 

[Tsumi]

That screams hardware problem rather than an OS problem.

 

[michalrz]

Does the audio go loopy? or does it play properly and if, say, a song ends, it will simply play the next item like nothing happened?

Does the event log contain any entries from after the moment it freezes?

Does replugging the mouse and/or keyboard help?

does the capslock or Numlock LED still work?

I don't see a PSU in your sig. You have a lot of hardware, just the drives all spinning up at once is quite a leap for this amount of gear.

I second B00nies idea about removing some RAM. I would add to that list - remove non-critical HDDs and other stuff. Cut the problem in half

 

[Sovereign]

After more research, it might be this which I thought only applied to full-blown blue screens. Upon further examination, it said "lock-ups" as well--implying that's different from blue screens.

This happens two or more times a day, so if the C-states end up fixing it, I should know pretty quickly.

For what it's worth, the P8P67 has a maximum of 32GB RAM so the quantity shouldn't be an issue. If the problem persists I will memtest it properly (I ran overnight but forgot to set it to loop so it ran a total of ONE pass).

The audio continues playing totally normally and there aren't any actual entries in the Event Log (hence my confusion).

 

[B00nie]

After more research, it might be this which I thought only applied to full-blown blue screens. Upon further examination, it said "lock-ups" as well--implying that's different from blue screens.

This happens two or more times a day, so if the C-states end up fixing it, I should know pretty quickly.

For what it's worth, the P8P67 has a maximum of 32GB RAM so the quantity shouldn't be an issue. If the problem persists I will memtest it properly (I ran overnight but forgot to set it to loop so it ran a total of ONE pass).

The audio continues playing totally normally and there aren't any actual entries in the Event Log (hence my confusion).

I hope you realize that running 25% of max capacity is one thing and running 100% of max capacity is a whole another ballpark. The closer you get to the max supported limit the pickier your board is going to be on ram.

For example I have a server that run with certain type of ram stable until 128Gb... but once it got upgraded to 192Gb all sticks had to be replaced due to stability problems.

 

[Sovereign]

I hope you realize that running 25% of max capacity is one thing and running 100% of max capacity is a whole another ballpark. The closer you get to the max supported limit the pickier your board is going to be on ram.

For example I have a server that run with certain type of ram stable until 128Gb... but once it got upgraded to 192Gb all sticks had to be replaced due to stability problems.

That's news to me, however I Googled and found something interesting.

VCC/VCCIO/CPUIO
It's CPU Input/Output (IO voltage terminals. This voltage work just like QPI/VVT/IMC and the default voltage is
1.05v but it needs to keep within 1.10 - 1.20v when your overclock beyond 4GHz, increasing this voltage also help
to improve the stability when 4 memory DIMMs occupied and its max speed (2133MHz). This high voltage
doesn't seem to affect overclocking.

My RAM has XMP spec to 1.65v, runs at 2133MHz, and has all four banks occupied. My VCCIO had been set at stock; I just raised it based on the quoted information.