can a PSU cause system freezes

[Wraith]

What are you temps like? Gigabyte boards have a funky feature that auto shuts down when the motherboard overheats, although it could also be a corrupt bios causing the problem. Also give your caps a look over to make sure none are cracked or buldging.

 

[hackeron]

The motherboard is a Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H running F16g 12/2013 bios (latest available). The capacitors on this board are solid state and physically look fine and it's a very very well ventilated case with 180mm fans (Silverstone SST-FT02B) - all the temperatures are around 28-35c including CPU.

 

[Wraith]

Right that rules that out for now, what error reports are you getting from the event viewer?

 

[hackeron]

None at all, on any operating system (including windows, mac and linux), just a hard lock, not a thing in the logs. I think we can exclude operating system errors because this happens running just memtest (after 1-2 weeks of running) but it sure doesn't make it any easier to diagnose

I just ordered a new power supply just in case - but the current one is a high quality Seasonic SS-560km one - also this PSU is 3 years old now, but this issue happened from day one, so unless the PSU has been operating faulty for 3 years, this doesn't seem the culprit either :/

 

[BBG280]

I have the same motherboard and it did the same thing. I finally just retired it.