Random BSOD last night while Arkham Asylum was paused

[futurefields]

Hey guys, so I built my computer last May, and everything has been great. However, last night I was playing Arkham Asylum, and paused the game to do something else and ended up getting sidetracked for about half an hour. When I came back then computer had BSOD'd, for the first time ever. I restarted the computer and everything has been fine since then, and ive done a bunch of gaming and stuff.

core i5 2500k @ 4.0ghz, w/ hyper 212+
asrock z77 pro-4
amd hd6850 1gb
8gb g.skill
wd black 500gb

my temps are always really good, well within the optimum range for stability.

is a random BSOD like this indicative of something wrong with the hardware in my system, or is it more likely that something just hiccup'd (that's the technical term im going with) and it's not too much to worry about?

thanks,

 

[sandorski]

Probably just the game and Power Saving settings or some such issue. If it re-occurs in other games/apps, then there could be an issue.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Probably the UE3 engine. Or somewhere something is not getting enough voltage.. e.g. RAM

 

[mfenn]

Do you have Vsync on or off?

If it's off, I imagine that your GPU was under a lot of stress while the game was paused because it was rendering the pause screen at some ridiculously high FPS. That would put a lot of stress on a small part of the GPU that handles actually rendering the frames and sending them out to the display. The parts of the GPU that normally have to work hard in an actual game like the shaders and memory would have essentially been doing nothing during that time. So basically the stress pattern was much different than in normal usage, which is why your system is usually stable. I honestly wouldn't worry about it too much unless you make a habit of keeping games paused or on the menu a lot.