Frequent restarts

[EneCtin]

I've been having this issue since I've bought the game (some 3 weeks) but only in Factorio: frequent system freezes, at irregular intervals, needing hard reboot. There is a buzz in the speakers, video remains frozen. This is so frequent that it starts to deter me from playing, knowing that in 5 to 50 minutes I'll have lost my part of my work since the last autosave (determining where you were and what needed then to be done is not fun when repeated frequently).
Such behavior is not seen on other games, my rig runs them without hitch and it is far from a potato. I'm running at 1280x1024 resolution. 2 licensed antivirus programs say it's clean of malware etc
If anything, system freezes are more frequent when enabling those options for vram etc.

Give me alternatives please.

[Zavian]

Factorio should not be able to cause a system freeze, so I suspect either hardware problems (eg bad ram) or driver issues.

I suggest checking for updated drivers, and running a memory test overnight (eg http://www.memtest.org/).

If those don't help upload your factorio log (https://wiki.factorio.com/Log_file).

[EneCtin]

Ran some MemTests, may be on to something there:
While the normal tests run fine, the Force Multi-threading test(SMP) becomes unresponsive at 21% at about 3 minutes (no error, red cross keeps blipping just no response to kb but test time stays at 3:26 seconds). Did several runs, same behaviour, almost the same cutoff time.
Says on their site the SMT (T not P) is experimental something for multicore things...that's CPU related right?
Anyway, it's the same behaviour (sort off) that I got ingame. What should I check next? I'm thinking CPU...maybe? Or other memory test, maybe it catches the same problem?

PS Uploaded a photo of the Memtest screen, maybe you guys figure it out there...

[Jap2.0]

What happens if you turn down "max render threads" in the options?

[DaleStan]

That behavior makes me think you have flaky hardware. If you are overclocking (I don't recognize any evidence of that in Memtest) then I'd first recommend trying without overclocking. The next diagnostic step is to see if your computer still freezes (either in Memtest or Factorio) with only one stick of memory, and then only the other stick. If you know which one is the "second" stick, I'd remove that one first. If it only happens with one memory stick, it's probably that stick. I have this thought (which may be wrong) that there are also some errors that follow the memory slot, instead of following the memory stick. I don't know how to tell if that sort of error is a CPU error or a motherboard error, though.

[EneCtin]

What happens if you turn down "max render threads" in the options?

That seems to have solved it. With 1 set to max render threads, no reset in about 2 hours. From 3 threads back to 1 thread there was no discernible drop in responsiveness.
Will see if the good spell holds during weekend.
Thank you all for your good advices!