Can you guys help me decide what to do please?

I'm getting hard crashes pretty frequently now. Sometimes BSOD, sometimes just freezing, sometimes black screen. Doesn't matter if i'm in-game or doing anything in Windows (browsing web, using file manager, etc). I have formatted the C drive and reinstalled Windows 7. Makes no difference, so it can't be software/driver related. Event Viewer doesn't log the actual crash, so i'm not sure what's at fault.

The machine is a bit dated now, but still fulfils my demands, so i would prefer to try and "fix" it by replacing the faulty part/s rather than buying a new PC.

What do you think I should try?

Intel Core i5 655K @ 4.4GHz
8GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel RAM
Gigabyte P55-US3L Motherboard
Zotac GTX275 896MB
Intel SSD 180GB 330 Series MLC 25nm SATA 6GB/s 9.5mm SSD
Western Digital 1TB SATA2
Corsair CX650 PSU

Easiest thing to do is to replace the RAM and see if the crashes persist. I'm sure you can borrow some from another machine or a friend or pick some up cheap second hand.

Edit: or if you have two separate units you can try running one at a time.

Seems the windows update following the format+reinstallation fixed it, phew !

Grats.. looks like you dodged a bullet. My experience with things randomly going sideways rarely ends well.

You lucky bastard. I've never managed to fix a PC breaking issue like that by doing a simple sys restore. It's always a broken GPU or some other shit.

I actually recently replaced my old GPU because of hard freezes and crashes. Was pretty weird as it would pretty much consistently crash in some games but not in others with higher demands. Also, it often wouldn't crash while in a game but a few minutes after I closed it. So I'd be doing simple emailing or browsing and it would just do a hard freeze then. But never if I didn't play a game before. Really bizarre. Since there were so many issues but with so many different 'symptoms' (slowdowns in games, hard freezes in and out of games, BSODs, etc) I figured it must have been the GPU and replacing it did the trick. The old one was 3-4 years old anyway so eh, I guess it was par for the course.

yea, I guess that's the unfortunate reality of being a gamer. You're regularly putting your system under very heavy load for possibly hours at a time. It's inevitable something important breaks eventually.... GPU, memory or CPU typically. I guess I've been pretty lucky with my current box since nothing's gone south yet. In a year or two if my computer is still working without issue, it'll probably become my living room VR rig when I a build a new machine.