Grrr PC started to reboot during games recently

Geosurface

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Mar 22, 2012
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So annoying... I hadn't really sunk my teeth into any games in a long while and the only thing I was doing was just mindlessly playing CS:GO a lot while listening to YouTube videos and watching movies.

Well, a few days ago my PC decided to just reboot mid CS:GO and now I'm getting the same nonsense in Witcher 2 which I figured I'd finally take a go at...

god I hate this kind of crap. Seems like any amount of time spent in Windows 7 won't do it, but pretty much any game is starting to do it... well maybe not Scribblenauts, not sure on that one. Tried that a bit. But Witcher 2 and CS:GO for sure, and I feel like there was another one that did it.
 

Markbnj

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Yeah, would guess heat, or the PSU is failing. It's worth opening it up and making sure the fans are all clear, and that dust isn't clogging up the works.
 

Dankk

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Jul 7, 2008
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Bummer. Anything in the Windows error log? If not, check your temperatures, and if they look fine, I would try putting in a different PSU.
 

Geosurface

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Mar 22, 2012
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It's hard for me to believe it's heat or PSU because I just got these last year:

eb8tmVF.png


The case is very good for cooling and it's a pretty nice PSU, and not very old... and these games haven't even been running all that long before it shuts down. I feel like it's some sort of generalized, super hard to track down or do anything about... software malfeasance.

I've had this kind of crap happen on every computer I've ever had, I think... and oddly enough it seems like this sort of thing will come in spurts, happen a lot for a while, then stop happening again for months... I don't know, I just hate it.
 

PowerYoga

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Nov 6, 2001
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check the heat during games. Also run memtest.

You gotta go through these troubleshooting steps no matter how "good" the components are since there's always the possibility of failure.
 

KaOTiK

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You would be surprised how dust can really screw up your temps. Also with it being a hotter than normal summer for most that can effect it as well.
 

Geosurface

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Mar 22, 2012
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I'm going to run Witcher 2 again with all Chromes closed (I had a lot of tabs open in 2 instances of it before) and with the temp monitor running as per you guys' good suggestions.

Just in windows here it's saying 30 degrees C for the CPU temp, same for motherboard.

I have a electric air blower (got tired of the bad taste in the air from compressed air cans) which kicks ass and I actually just opened up my case a couple of days ago and blew it out thoroughly, so it should be very low dust in there right now.
 

PowerYoga

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Nov 6, 2001
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also check video card drivers. Some recent ones have been known to cause blue screens.
 

Juddog

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Dec 11, 2006
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I had pretty much the exact same issue for a period of about 3 months; during that time I swapped out the GPU after measuring the PSU output and seeing it was steady as a rock; I tweaked my RAM timings to be more relaxed, I put a fan right by the case to start blowing air on it so that there wasn't extra heat collected around the case.

Ultimately I was swapping out the SSD to another bigger SSD (I was upgrading to get more disk space, not to try and get a faster SSD), and when I was wiping the old SSD and ran a SMART test against it, I received an error message saying that it was end of life from the diagnostic tool.

I thought it was strange, but basically every since I haven't had literally a single crash; this confirms it was actually the SSD causing errors and nothing else.

I would recommend running a full suite of SMART diagnostics against the drive that holds your OS, preferably from a third party OS / rescue disk. In my case I used a USB stick and put a Linux boot image on there which had the diagnostic utilities.

This was the distro I used:
http://partedmagic.com/doku.php
 

KaOTiK

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Feb 5, 2001
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I'm going to run Witcher 2 again with all Chromes closed (I had a lot of tabs open in 2 instances of it before) and with the temp monitor running as per you guys' good suggestions.

Just in windows here it's saying 30 degrees C for the CPU temp, same for motherboard.

I have a electric air blower (got tired of the bad taste in the air from compressed air cans) which kicks ass and I actually just opened up my case a couple of days ago and blew it out thoroughly, so it should be very low dust in there right now.

It might not be heat, but it is one of the easiest things to check. I have bad heat problems with my PC. I have to keep the side of the case off and I have a clip on fan clipped to the top of the case blowing it to keep it from overheating when I do anything during the summer. Winter I don't have to turn the fan on unless I'm doing anything intensive.
 

Seba

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Sep 17, 2000
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I have a electric air blower (got tired of the bad taste in the air from compressed air cans) which kicks ass and I actually just opened up my case a couple of days ago and blew it out thoroughly, so it should be very low dust in there right now.
Well, a few days ago my PC decided to just reboot mid CS:GO and now I'm getting the same nonsense in Witcher 2
Cause and effect?

Check the graphics card temperature during games. You could use GPU-Z to log the temperatures (and read the log after a reboot happens).
 

Dankk

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Jul 7, 2008
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Cause and effect?

Check the graphics card temperature during games. You could use GPU-Z to log the temperatures (and read the log after a reboot happens).

If he doesn't have two monitors, I would suggest running Witcher 2 in windowed mode and have GPU-Z sitting adjacent to it so he can read the sensors while playing.
 

sm625

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May 6, 2011
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Take out your video card and put it back in. (Reseat it.) Make sure that the PCIe edge connector is fully inserted into the slot and stays that way even when you screw it down. (Sometimes it pops halfway out of the socket when you screw it down. And this often goes unnoticed because the card will often still work/)

The next step is to probably order a new video card. If the new one does the same thing you can always return it. (Just make sure you can return it, and what if any the restocking fee will be for returning it.)
 

JamesV

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Jul 9, 2011
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I had a similar thing happen to me lately, and it was the GPU overheating. First Tomb Raider would run for 3 minutes, then black screen. Then it started happening in Defense Grid.

Took off the GUP cover, and there was a mat of dust directly in front of the air intake.

No more issues at all after cleaning it.
 

Juddog

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Dec 11, 2006
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Before you go replacing a bunch of equipment, run diagnostics on everything to try and see where the issue is.

Hardware monitor: will tell you temp on systemboard, CPU, etc. and also let you check voltage levels
MSI afterburner / video card utility of choice: shows you the GPU usage and temps
Hard drive utility (e.g. parted magic) shows you SMART diagnostics on all hard drives.

Lastly grab a BSOD parsing utility and see what the BSOD shows.
 

Geosurface

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Mar 22, 2012
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I've got 2 monitors, and as to cause and effect with regard to blowing the dust out of the case, it had crossed my mind too but I'm pretty sure I blew the air out after the reboots started.

I just ran Witcher 2 for maybe about 15 minutes, 20 tops... before it did it again. This time there was no Trillian open, no Chrome open... and I had the temperature monitor running on the secondary monitor. It's the Asus temp monitor program... AI Suite or some such.

It doesn't look like it lists a GPU temperature, but it lists CPU and Motherboard, CPU is about 30c in Windows 7 as previously stated, I never saw it go above 47c during the game, and the moment of crash didn't seem to be a particularly graphically intense segment of the game... in fact, none of the parts I was playing did.

It hovered in the 41 or 42c range most of the time, but it seems like I'd better snag this GPU-Z program to find out the temperature of the video card.

The card, btw, is a GTX 670 purchased a few months ago.

I think I'll try shutting down the PC, blowing it out again with the air blower while it's completely powered down, then reseat the video card, and try Witcher 2 again with GPU-Z going

Btw I'm not getting blue screens, it just reboots.
 

Juddog

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Dec 11, 2006
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I've got 2 monitors, and as to cause and effect with regard to blowing the dust out of the case, it had crossed my mind too but I'm pretty sure I blew the air out after the reboots started.

I just ran Witcher 2 for maybe about 15 minutes, 20 tops... before it did it again. This time there was no Trillian open, no Chrome open... and I had the temperature monitor running on the secondary monitor. It's the Asus temp monitor program... AI Suite or some such.

It doesn't look like it lists a GPU temperature, but it lists CPU and Motherboard, CPU is about 30c in Windows 7 as previously stated, I never saw it go above 47c during the game, and the moment of crash didn't seem to be a particularly graphically intense segment of the game... in fact, none of the parts I was playing did.

This pretty much rules out the CPU as the cause.

It hovered in the 41 or 42c range most of the time, but it seems like I'd better snag this GPU-Z program to find out the temperature of the video card.

The card, btw, is a GTX 670 purchased a few months ago.

This rules out the GPU overheating.

I think I'll try shutting down the PC, blowing it out again with the air blower while it's completely powered down, then reseat the video card, and try Witcher 2 again with GPU-Z going

Btw I'm not getting blue screens, it just reboots.

GPU's and CPU's don't start getting problems until they are in the 80 - 100 degree range; if you're at the temps stated above, you can rule out the temps.

Your next step should be to download a BSOD analyzer, and grab the dump file created from the last BSOD, and see what the BSOD analyzer shows as the cause (e.g. a driver, a hardware device, etc.).
 

Geosurface

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Mar 22, 2012
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Thank you all for the great tips, I've downloaded something called "bluescreenview" which appears to be a BSOD analyzer, but if anyone can recommend a better one that'd be awesome. One that shows the cause, as you say. Not sure if this does that or not.

It's not listing the crashes in the last few days btw, but I suspect it needs to be running during a crash or at least installed before it? Oddly, it does show 2 crashes one from 6/30/13 and one from 3/1/13 - but it doesn't seem to have any record of the last few days' crashes.
 

Dankk

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BlueScreenView only analyzes BSOD crash dumps. If you get any crashes without a blue screen, then BlueScreenView probably isn't going to help you.

I would run Memtest86 for a few hours to check for memory problems, if you haven't already.

Also, for future use: click Start > right-click Computer > Properties > Advanced System Settings > Startup and Recovery Settings > Select "Small Memory Dump (256k)" under Write Debugging information. This will create mini crash dumps that are easier to upload online for us to analyze.
 

toughtrasher

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Mar 17, 2013
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Huh, I recently started getting problems with GO too.

It was working perfectly just a while ago, then I launch it again the next day suddenly I get a black screen and the sound keeps looping. Redownloaded twice now.
 

Midwayman

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I had a heat issue on my CPU where it didn't show up as a warning on the temp. The thermal paste hadn't spread very well and it had left one of the cores relatively uncovered. It was overheating, but the temp probe said fine. Soon as I re-did the paste everything was stable again. Drove me nuts trying to figure out what it was.
 

FalseChristian

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I hate to say and it's simplistic (before someone calls me a troll). You might want to reinstall a fresh copy of windows (reformat). It's a pain but it usually works when nothing else does.
 

Juddog

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Thank you all for the great tips, I've downloaded something called "bluescreenview" which appears to be a BSOD analyzer, but if anyone can recommend a better one that'd be awesome. One that shows the cause, as you say. Not sure if this does that or not.

It's not listing the crashes in the last few days btw, but I suspect it needs to be running during a crash or at least installed before it? Oddly, it does show 2 crashes one from 6/30/13 and one from 3/1/13 - but it doesn't seem to have any record of the last few days' crashes.

The key is if it shows a bluescreen and states it's writing to file, then let it write the process completely. If you see a value, like "STOP 0x0000007a (0xc02882bc, 0xc000009a, 0xa20afeb4, 0x58fd7880)", then try to write down the portion after the stop as quick as possible.

As Dankk mentions above, the bluescreen viewer can only analyze the file if it's completely written to the hard drive; if a process interrupts that, or alternately if it just straight reboots without a bluescreen with writing on it, then you won't be able to see it. Sometimes you can glean what the error was by sifting through your windows event log though.