Rebuilt my DAW over the winter with an I7 4700K an ASUS Z87-K and 16GB Kingston HyperX Genesis.
Everything at stock settings.
It worked OK well the weather was cool but, on reflection, started getting flaky as the temperature rose.
I was concentrating more on my live work at the time so wasn't needing to use the studio and didn't get around to troubleshooting the problem.
I got into the studio last week wanting to do some stuff and the thing has become intolerable with random freezes, BSODs, shut downs etc etc!
So, not putting 2 and 2 together, I started troubleshooting. I ran memtest for several hours with no errors, updated all the drivers including the graphics, reverted to a disk image with minimal programs installed, all to no avail.
I finally got to cooling. I'm thinking it's only a stock cooler but I'm not overclocking or running heavy loads so it should be OK?
I purchased Aida64 Extreme on recommendation of a friend and started checking things out.
The CPU was idling at around 60-65 Celsius! At full load it was up to around 95-97 with spikes of 100!!
So I went out and got a Coolermaster TX3 Evo (wanted to stick with push pins to avoid removing the motherboard to fit a backplate).
On removing the stock cooler, which felt securely fixed, I was shocked to see that the pre applied thermal compound was only melted over about 50% of the copper disc on the heatsink with the stripes still untouched on the rest, revealing that it had not been in full contact with the cpu.
I've now installed the CM TX3 and it's idling at 28-32C and up to around 65-70 at full load.
Now I'm worried that I've fried my cpu?!
Been building my own PC systems for about 20 years now and never had this problem before!