Performance :: Hard Freeze When Idle For A Short Period

It seems to have started after a recent Windows update, but I'm not sure exactly what specific element has screwed things up for me and it may have taken a bit of time for me to notice the problem due to the nature of it. I wouldn't know when to roll back my system to even if I was willing to try, and I'm not at this point.

If I leave Windows 10 alone for more than a few minutes, it freezes. This happens without fail and it's consistent. Any more than five minutes give or take a minute or two and it's frozen hard and requires a hard reset. Ctrl alt del doesn't work, alt tab doesn't work, nothing but the power button or the reset button on the case has any affect.

There is no error message, there is no spinning wheel mouse icon, the mouse pointer doesn't move. It's just frozen and no input does anything. The screen just has a still image of whatever was displaying when it happened and audio is also dead, no system sounds or anything. There was sound once, but it was when I had a game running and left it too long, and it was just that locked up audio buzzing sound. It's a hard lockup of my system and not just the video getting stuck.

It also doesn't matter if something is running. If I have a video or game running, it still happens. As long as I'm not actively inputting something with an input device such as the keyboard, mouse, or a gamepad it locks up. If I pause a game to go get something to eat it's frozen when I come back, if I'm watching a video and get up to go to the bathroom it's locked up when I get back, it doesn't matter if I pause whatever it is or leave it running.

If I'm doing something, typing, playing a game, or whatever, it will run for hours uninterrupted. No problems whatsoever. I've got Fallout 4 and I've played for several hours without any problems as long as I'm sitting there and actually playing the game.

It's like the PC is trying to go to sleep or go into an idle or power saving mode from a lack of input and is crashing hard as a result. The problem is I've disabled everything that would do that.

I'm running Windows 10 x64 Home edition. I have an i7 3770k, 16Gb of Ram, two Radeon HD 7970s in Xfire [doesn't matter if this is on or off], and my boot drive is a SSD. It's not a new system and Windows 10 has been running fine on it for several months now.

I've already disabled all screensavers, there are no scheduled tasks or updates screwing with anything. They all happen in the middle of the night and nothing is pending. All my drivers are up to date, caches have been cleared, and everything runs fine as long as I'm there and active. The usual suite of common updating software such as adobe and virus definitions are also up to date, so that isn't it either.

I have already disabled shut downs and sleeping in the power settings. Every power setting has been adjusted so that my PC never shuts down on its own and was already set that way to begin with. I've double checked and everything is still set the way it should be. I've already turned off Link State Power Management in all power settings. That isn't it either.

I do have AMD's new Crimson drivers, but this was happening before I installed them. That's not the source of the problem. I installed the new driver in the hope of maybe fixing the problem and it had no effect on it.

I've scanned for viruses, malware, and adware. My system is clean.

My temps are fine, all system monitors show a clean bill of health and no unusual activity spikes in my hardware. Task Manager, processes, and services don't show any extra or unusual programs running. Nothing is out of the ordinary when this happens outside of there being no input for a bit.

There are no error messages popping up at all. No BSOD or indication of any problems outside of the freezing itself. It just locks up suddenly and once it does no input does anything but a reset using the tower's power buttons.