I've been dealing with an exceptionally frustrating issue for the past 6-8 months -- chronic system freezes. At first, I thought it was solely a Lightroom issue. It always happened during heavy editing sessions with Lightroom. Very, very rarely with Photoshop. Then, today, I was using Capture 9 to edit an image for a client -- and it happened. I'll be working along, and then the screen freezes and therefore the computer. My ONLY resort is to hit the power button and do a hard reset/turn off. About 3 or 4 times out of 10, Windows won't boot up, and I have to repeat the process of using the power button, occasionally a couple of times. Once in a while, I'll get the message that Windows did not restart properly and use that option to then boot into safe mode, then power down and reboot normally. By the way, I also uncheck "Use GPU" in Lightroom because I've had more issues and more freezes related to that.
My graphics card is an Asus/AMD Radeon R9 280X-DC2, clocked normally.I used nVidia for years, but it seemed they were always releasing buggy drivers, only to be corrected a week later.
My system is home built (several years ago) and is a relatively powerful system. (I upgraded my power supply to a 1050 watt unit since I draw so much power via peripherals.):
CPU: AMD FX-9590 MOTHERBOARD: Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z
Memory: 32GB, G. Skill Overclocked per manufacturer/Asus (system crashes if you DON'T overclock!)
C drive: Samsung SSD
D,E,F: 1TB drive
Lots of external drives
Finally, my question. Are my issues the graphics card? I can't figure out where to look at this point.