Computer Freeze

[RAMChYLD]

One pass is enough. This means that the hardware is fine and the problem is related to overheating or drivers.

Is your brother's desktop running NVidia drivers? What version?

[Blackberry Bun]

Display driver, right?

AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series
Driver Version 8.980.0.0

The driver is a bit older version than proper because the supposedly proper version causes flickering all over the screen while playing Skyrim. I did the same with my own PC and there's no freeze occurring, so this should not be the problem.

Maybe I've already mentioned this somewhere else, but I'll mention it again here. My brother's PC is pretty much a clone of my PC, being different only in hard disk size (His is double than mine) and casing design.

[huckleberrypie]

You tried running SpeedFan and/or GPU-Z, too? You probably need to re-paste (read: re-apply thermal compound) or clean your GPU/CPU if that turns up to be the culprit.

[RAMChYLD]

Well, then it comes down to two things: Ventilation and cooling. Is all the fan vents in the PC installed with fans? Is the CPU tower placed somewhere cooling?

Don't think it's the drivers. Unlike NVidia drivers, AMD drivers are usually very stable (unless used with NVidia motherboards. Guess why).

[huckleberrypie]

Well, then it comes down to two things: Ventilation and cooling. Is all the fan vents in the PC installed with fans? Is the CPU tower placed somewhere cooling?

And is it caked with dust? As in a LOT of dust?

[Blackberry Bun]

Well, then it comes down to two things: Ventilation and cooling. Is all the fan vents in the PC installed with fans? Is the CPU tower placed somewhere cooling?

One intake and one outtake. There are two remaining vacant vents. Recently brought it to a computer shop for examination and cleaning. They didn't find anything wrong.
The room where the PC is placed has its air conditioner on most of the time.

Late to say this, but the "randomly freezing" happens quite rarely. About once every 1-2 weeks. Also, all occurrences happened while playing a game or browsing sites that are quite heavy (Youtube video embedded on it, GIF animation, Youtube site itself, etc).

[RAMChYLD]

Hmmm... try adding two more exhaust fans to the two vacant slot.

Another thing that just occurred to me: how powerful is the power supply unit? Usually it's unlikely that a lack of power be the cause of this since insufficient power usually causes a motherboard to outright not boot, but it's worth a look into.

[Blackberry Bun]

So, it just happened again. Just when I thought I got it fixed. I guess from now on I will keep a log of occurrences.

3 Feb: While playing a game
25 Feb: While watching Youtube

And quite a number of more occurrences before those two in varying ranges, once every 1-2 weeks on average.

Every single occurrence happened while the Graphic Card is being used, so I'm still pretty convinced there's a hardware problem there.

[RAMChYLD]

Hmmm...

Could be three things:
1. GPU overheating. Probably need to install the extra fans. If you're using overclocked cards, consider downgrading to non-overclocked ones since overclocked cards run much hotter.
2. Power Suppy insufficient. Usually unlikely in that the PC will not boot at all when there's not enough power, but I've experienced hangs and crashes from using a weak power supply in the past. Check the voltage of the power supply against your system. If it's quite a powerful setup, go for at least 700w. For mainstream usually I recommend 600w for optimum. 500w is baseline.
3. Motherboard design flaw. This one I just worked out recently. Some motherboards produced between 2008-2012 has a design flaw that causes it to crash or act erratic when a feature called Message-Signaled Interrupts is enabled for the GPU (I see this problem on my NForce980 and 750 motherboards- on my Windows-based 980, it causes the "driver has stopped responding" error and the blue screen of death to appear intermittently, on the Linux-based 750 it randomly causes hangs and randomly disables USB). I know how to at least tell the NVidia drivers to not use the feature on Linux (after working on it for almost 3 years). For ATI and Windows... I need time to do more research.

[huckleberrypie]

Have you tried checking your GPU's temperature, as well as if it's spewing out any artifacts i.e. garbled display or wonky/mangled polygons in games?