Damn video has been freezing up lately.
Motherboard- Gigabyte 970A-DS3P with 8 gigs
Processor- AMD FX-6300 six core
Video- AMD Radeon R7 200 Series(I don’t know which one. This is the info Belarc Advisor gave me).
Can the processor and/or vid card be updated on this motherboard?
Looking up your components, it’s not a matter of if it can be upgraded, should you upgrade it? Here’s a list of processors your board supports, but based on the components, you system is at least 3-4 years old. It would probably only cost you a few hundred dollars to upgrade the CPU and video card, but you’re still several generations behind the newest components.
If you’re running Windows or Linux, a fresh reinstall may be the best thing to do as it removes all the little things that have added up to slow down your system. Make sure to make a complete backup or even better close the entire OS drive to another disc. If you’re not already using an SSD for or OS drive, it will likely make a more significant improvement than a hardware upgrade which is really only incremental at this point.
Rereading your post, if the video is freezing when it was working fine before, it could likely be a hardware issue, with the video card a possible candidate, but not the CPU since most of the load of video is on the video card. Other possible hardware reasons in no order, are bad RAM (unplug and replug them firmly), bad power supply or bad motherboard. Unless you have the spare parts, probably better to just start from scratch with a new system, DIY or prebuilt as even components two or three generations old are still newer and better than what you currently have.
If I had the money to start over I would do so. How much would a somewhat better vid card run me? At the moment the only game I play regularly is DDO.
The first thing you want to do with an old computer that is “running slow” or “crashing” is get out the can of compressed air, some Q-tips, and the vacuum cleaner. Open it up, use compressed air to blow out the heatsinks on the CPU and and the Video card until you can’t see any more dust in between the fins. Use the Q-tips if needed for hard to reach places, and vacuum out all the dust. Then turn the computer on and make sure all fans are spinning. May need to load up a game or something to put enough load to make sure they all turn. Good percentage of the time that fixes everything, and your issue was heat related rather than any hardware issue at all.
If still an issue, I would download https://www.memtest86.com/ and make a bootable USB stick, boot and test the RAM. If you get errors, you likely have bad RAM or motherboard.
If no issues, probably video card itself, power supply, or software (need to “reinstall”).
As far as upgrades, you can upgrade the video card if you have a big enough power supply, you can get literally any new PCI-E video card you want and it will work. CPU and RAM on that board have possible minor upgrades, but aren’t worth it - get a new motherboard and CPU if you need to do that. In the budget space an R5 2600 and a B450 board get pretty cheap for good performance right now.
Under what circumstances do your graphics problems occur? I had a similar-sounding issue, and it was with my graphics card. When I was running a graphics-intensive game or simulation and the card’s hardware got over a certain temperature, it crashed. Replacing the video card with a newer, not-broken one fixed the problem.
If it crashes under “normal” use, you might try the following: if your motherboard has an onboard graphics capability–and many do–to plug your monitor into the motherboard directly, and unplug the graphics card. You might need a different kind of cable to interface between your MoBo’s graphics port and your monitor.
Normal windows operations, such as office software, browsers, disc players (Blu-ray or DVD) and YouTube can easily be handled by the generic onboard graphics capabilities of a motherboard. Bypassing the graphics card and getting good results could help you isolate the problem to a faulty graphics card (GPU).