Hello,

You may remember me from my ongoing shitstorm of PC troubles. At the end of my last thread I had taken it to a PC repair place but with the issue being so hard to reproduce I was left unable to diagnose the issue specifically and basically decided to live with it seeing as it only very frequently happened in Wolfenstein II. I was able to finish Prey albeit with it beginning to crash towards shortly after initial loads toward end of my playthrough. I think this might have had something to do with saves as when I did a speedrun for achievements later on with only a single save slot it didn't seem to crash as much only crashing once compared to my original run with 20 manual saves. After that I played 14 wonderful hours of Pyre without a single hiccup. I've started Quantum Break and it's quantum breaking my balls again it seems. I've got about an hour logged and it has crashed multiple times but interestingly it's doing it in new exciting ways different than before.

Whenever Prey or Wolfenstein crashed it rebooted the whole PC. Quantum Break is using cool new methods such as crashing with a "Out of Memory" error that caused my chrome tab on my second screen to become a nightmare of black boxes. It has also crashed with a traditional "Quantum Break" has stopped working but that also causes Steam to shutdown entirely. My favourite one so far is when it caused a Display driver stopped working error which left my main monitor blank and all my display instead on my second monitor. I have yet to swap out a GPU to see if it's the GPU at fault but it seems like its fucked but I am still confused. Benchmarks never do it. Only games. I have run the Superposition benchmark many times and it never crashes it. Similarly when I ran CPU benchmarks before reinstalling windows they never crashed the PC. I have not tried since but do not suspect there would be much of a difference.

This is where I need the help of the groupmind. Is there any memtest style software that thoroughly goes over a GPU and checks if it is fucked? Could it possibly be a hard-drive issue as the save/loading crashes seem to occur there. Could this all be stemming from a PSU issue? Could PSU issues cause these sorts of issues? Maybe I just don't want to believe it's the GPU that is fucked.

There are small strange things too. When I boot now since the windows reinstall all the start up screens appear on my second monitor. The big one is definitely marked as primary but it's weird. Also whenever I start up my PC chrome always launch itself and restores whatever tabs I had. It's not in the startup list and I've unchecked turn on at startup but it always does it now. It's little things that make it feel like maybe it's not just the GPU.

Which brings me to the next natural course of action: Buy a replacement GPU. My current (busted?) GPU is a 980 ti. To buy a replacement from Newegg costs 1000 USD. And that's just to return to where I was at before. An actual upgrade to a 1080ti would cost 1200 USD+. So fuck you very much Bitcoin miners. I literally cannot afford to fix my PC. RIP.

Edit: Got a new one since posting this. Game run totally fine for a good long while. Then it got to a cutscene which are prerendered (I can tell because they are less clear and run at 30 fps) and bam crashed AND had Windows disable the GPU. I googled Error 43 and its a driver issue apparently so I might try rolling back a driver but I'd be shocked if that was it. Picture Below

Edit 2: Another new one. Sounds memory related again? Could it be bad ram? I ran Memtest overnight but maybe I missed something. Is that possible? Is this even the same sort of memory?

I can't imagine how a GPU crash would restart the machine without even a stop error. It does look like a dying PSU or mobo (VRMs.)

It absolutely sucks shit to have to buy a second PSU (it would even be annoying if you got one for free) but I don't see how you troubleshoot weird issues like this without trying a known working one.

The programs opening themselves thing is part of the Creators Update. If you don't want them to do that, exit them before you shut down the system.

Have you tried a clean install of the latest nvidia driver. with this i mean uninstall every nvidia driver on the pc and install a new one ? Also are temperatures fine of your CPU and GPU ? Maybe check out your pclogs for critical errors that could link to the real problem. Also the crashes are always to desktop ? And yeah if the crashes are a sudden pc restart it's probably your PSU that broke.

Thanks for explaining the creators thing. At least that part of the PC isn't haunted. At least PSU's aren't 500+ bucks. I can feasibly budget for one of those and keep telling myself even if it's not the PSU it's an upgrade (right?). I hope it's not the motherboard as this is a replacement one for one that I had for ages but had a ram slot die. What's VRMs sorry?

Yeah today I installed it clean but today is also when I started playing Quantum Break so I can't be sure whether it's the game or the driver. I'm doing a clean install of a driver from December and will work my way towards the present and see if any stop the crashing. Speaking of the crashing it's only been a CTD with Quantum Break. The other crashes on Prey and described in the OP of my original nightmare are straight to reboot. No BSOD, no "Windows didn't shutdown properly" just Pop. Here's a video of the whole process.

Edit: Just now Quantum Break did the full reboot crash. Hit a button to trigger a prerendered cutscene and pop. Rebooting. I went to film it but naturally the second time it worked. Temperatures are totally fine as far as I can tell. When this first started happening I even made a video of speccy as I played it while crashing. HW monitor tells a similar tale. I'm not familiar with pclogs? Where do they live.

Thanks!

I'd had some similar intermittent problems a few years ago and changed the video card, then motherboard before I found out my PSU was knackered.

@hayt: VRMs are the voltage regulators on the motherboard. They're another stage of the power delivery to your machine so if they are bad the symptoms can be similar to a bad power supply, although you would expect to see CPU-only problems as well.

I realized after I posted that if the GPU did cause a blue screen you might not even see it before Windows auto-restarts the system. Can you go to C:\Windows\Minidump and see if there are any recently created crash dumps there?

@mavs: I can't seem to find anything on minidump. C:\Windows\Minidump nor C:\Winnt\minidump seem to exist and even a whole PC search of "minidump" returns nothing.

Also we got a new one everyone. This seems memory related? I might run memtest overnight again but last time it said nothing was wrong.

@hayt: yeah sorry for my bad description it's just called "event viewer" it's a windows tool that comes with windows. just type it into your search bar. if the thing is full of critical power failure errors then it's probably your PSU. And you can always do a memory check by typing mdsched.exe.

@hayt said:

@mavs: I can't seem to find anything on minidump. C:\Windows\Minidump nor C:\Winnt\minidump seem to exist and even a whole PC search of "minidump" returns nothing.

Also we got a new one everyone. This seems memory related? I might run memtest overnight again but last time it said nothing was wrong.

That's a logic error. Someone somewhere tried to reference a null pointer, it says QuantumBreak.exe but it could have happened in a driver or runtime library. I'd expect that to be a software bug, but who knows.

Try using WhoCrashed to see if it can find any crash dumps.

@soulcake: Oh yep okay. Well there's a lot here but I'm not sure how to interpret all of it, sorry.

This is under Level "Critical". Sounds like power issues? Not sure what Kernel-Power means exactly though. The time for the most recent one totally seems like when I got the full reboot during the game just before.

These details are all basically the same as well. Bugcheck everything is always 0. Only thing that changes is SystemSleepTransitionsToOn is sometimes a number between 0 and 6 but very much mostly 0.

Wtf. Also just got a reboot crash then while just on Giant Bomb and Facebook (another Kernel-Power in Event Viewer) . Clearly this issue knows we are closing in on it. Never done that before though.

My only experience with crashing video card drivers was a RAM timing issue. The motherboard's automatic settings were not correct, so I had to manually configure them. The drivers have never crashed again.

That is well outside my wheelhouse. Any idea how I'd begin to check if my ram timings are correct?

@mavs: Thanks. I did just try WhoCrashed but it said "Crash dumps are enabled but no valid crash dumps have been found. In case you are experiencing system crashes, it may be that crash dumps are prevented from being written out." but it does point to how to setup dumps so that if it happens again.

It could be ram, but its most likely your power supply. If you have the money might just be time for a new build.

@oursin_360: I can afford maybe a new PSU but not a whole new build. Not with GPU prices being what they are right now. I'm gonna run memtest over night again but even if that says clean I might take it out a stick at a time and see if it still crashes then.

@hayt: You'll need to know what the timing is supposed to be. You should be able to find that info on the manufacturer's website. Then boot into the BIOS or UEFI, usually by tapping a particular key (delete or one of the F keys, it depends on your motherboard) while the computer boots up. Once in the UEFI look around for the memory timings, and configure them manually if needed.

There is no standard UEFI, so I can't really provide more specific instructions. Sorry.

@hayt: At this point i would buy a new PSU. I had the same problem a few years back, games kept crashing with a computer reboot. With games that asked a lot of power like FallouT 4 or Xcom2 at the time while games that didn't asked much resources, just kept running and everything seemed fine until i played one of those more resource extensive once. If that makes any sense. Maybe check the cables inside the pc it self maybe there loose or just broken.

@hayt: If crash dumps are enabled but there are no crash dumps (and there's no stop errors in the events) then it's likely a power issue. PSU definitely sits at the top of the list of suspects.

Reading through your previous thread and this one, I'd have to tentatively agree with a PSU issue. The fact that, as far as I understand it, this started after you moved your PC is usually a symptom of capacitors in the PSU failing and then not holding charge. While plugged in and powered they are usually OK, but once you power off and move them the capacitors drain and then the fault rears its head. If the graphics card has passed benchmark tests (which sometimes don't fully load the PC like a game will) then you'd hope it's not a graphics card problem. If you've run memtest86+ over a few passes then it's likely not the RAM. If it doesn't just fail randomly then it's probably not the motherboard.

You don't say how old your build is, and as far as I know you haven't mentioned the make and model of the PSU, but as the processor is around 4 years old if you got the whole thing new at that time, if you either got a cheap PSU or you were a little tight on wattage then this is around the time that you would see problems.

@hayt Last thing to try before trying to fix the hardware: https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

Let DDU uninstall your drivers all the way, geforce experience and everything, do it in safe mode without networking then reboot and install the newest drivers and reboot again. Read the readme.

PSU is a good cheap option at this point.

Looking through this and the previous thread it is unclear whether you tried to overclock or not? If you have not attempted then if the PSU doesn't work I'd lean very heavily towards the MOBO.

@zirilius: I started to attempt an OC but didnt actually change anything. A friend and I started looking at the bios to start changing the OC but then this issue became apparent before we did anything more than turn Intel Boost on and off (it was default). That said if you know of any "restart to factory" methods for BIOS I could always try those to be tripley sure. But yes the issue first appeared before we even looked at bios and I don't think we changed anything.

@morello The PSU is a good one but it is old now. It's a Corsair HX750 which was rated Gold at the time a believe. It might be older than your assessment of age actually as I believe I've used it in a build and a half so it might be 5 years old. I'm struggling to remember exactly.

Most modern BIOS chips have a restore to default setting built in now within one of the sub-menus. You can also attempt to flash the bios and see if that helps as that will also restore everything back to factory settings.....usually.

@zirilius: Thanks. I had a look and I recall we used the reset when we were done so I'm willing to give the mobo a pass for now.

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Firstly Memtest ran for 8 hours and didn't find anything so I'm willing to let my ram off the hook.

I was able to borrow an old but functional GTX 580 from a friend and swapped that out. I used it to play Quantum Break for a bit without changing my settings (which is a miserable experience) and it took a while but it did eventually crash out, in a slightly different way but was similar to the display driver errors.

The game crashed to desktop and an "Out of Memory" popup with a "break" button appeared. Then another error window appeared which I tried to screenshot but then both screens went black with a huge (wrong resolution) cursor (pictured below) and at that point I cycled power on my PC. I'm going to try Wolfenstein as well to see if I can reproduce the exact same "total reboot" crash but this certainly seems to suggest it is not the GPU at fault unless this sort of total failure can happen to any GPU pushed beyond its limit. I lost focus at the moment it crashed but the temperatures were normal whenever I was checking. I've certainly never seen it before but I'm not an expert.

Sorry for the giant images if you are on desktop. They seem unreadable at medium though.

I'm also going with Power Supply.

You can do some more troubleshooting yourself by pulling the GPU entirely and trying just the integrated GPU if you have one. Other than that, doing things like using DDU and reinstalling fresh display drivers and then ultimately formatting and reinstalling Windows are steps you can take before spending money on a PSU. Depends on how much you value your time.

@mike: Cheers. I actually did a clean windows install in-between threads on this so hopefully that's thorough enough.

I am currently using this GTX 580 to troubleshoot but funnily it's below minimum system requirements of Wolfenstein which was the easiest reproducible full crash. I can easily reproduce the Out of Memory crashes for Quantum Break but am yet to get it to get it to do a full reboot but it didn't even do that right away on the 980 ti which I assume is harder on the PSU. I'll try without any GPU but I wonder if they wouldn't do it because the PSU being unable to properly power the GPU wouldnt happen with integrated graphics.

Yeah, I don't think you will really figure this out until you swap in a different PSU to test. You can try picking up a second hand one on Craigslist or whatever your local equivalent is, just give it the paperclip test when you pick it up to make sure it at least powers on. If your temps are all normal and the problem only happens when the system is under stress, with all the other things having been looked at it's most likely your PSU.

Also, the Corsair HX750 has a 7 year warranty. It might be worth looking into that, Corsair is pretty good about service and replacements.

@mike:Yeah I'll have a look. Funnily enough the Australian craigslist is called Gumtree. Sadly the odds of me still having my receipt for that PSU are low. I wasn't as fastidious then as I am now annoyingly.

To anyone in the thread: If I did buy one new (as even a top end Corsair one is only 170 USD) and it's turns out its not the PSU what are the odds of these sorts of crashes doing harm to a new PSU be?

@hayt: If it turns out to be the psu then your old gpu is probably still good so you could either sell that or return your new one and recoup on some money spent. Obviously test it out first etc.

So I bought a new PSU and installed it today and frankly preliminary tests don't look good.

In the brief tests I've done with Wolfenstein and Quantum Break I haven't had any of the full reboot crashes that started this issue but I've also had a few strings of bad shit I've never seen before.

Firstly I tried out Quantum Break which crashed with a pretty mundane "Quantum Break stopped working" error on a cutscene. After that I tried to run Wolfenstein and got a number of weird issues. Firstly it wouldn't get past the splash screens until I disabled cloud save and ran steam as an admin. Then it seemed to work fine until I set the graphics to "mein leben" which they've been on before and after this issue started. When I did that this time the game crashed entirely with a "couldn't allocate ram" issue (screenshot below).

Since I tried to change the settings during gameplay I tried next time to do it from the main menu before starting gameplay. That caused a different crash that flashed too fast for me to see but resulted in an error I have never before seen in my life saying it couldn't bring up Task Manager and it needed to be killed by holding down the power key.

Does anyone have ANY fucking clue what is going on now? I have never had a PC issue so bad in my entirely life. I mean granted, it hasn't done the full reboot crash thing yet but this doesn't look like it's working properly either.

Not gonna lie I am getting extremely bummed out by this. No one seems to have any answers because the problem changes every time.

Edit: Went back to test Quantum Break again. Get an Out of Memory error in the middle of the cutscene I am up to. Same one as before.

@hayt: like i said in the last thread, stop using Wolfenstein as a test game if you look on steam and check the reviews half of them are about how much it crashes. Quantum break also seems to have memory issues with Windows 10 on some cards. Try reinstalling your graphics drivers and testing more stable games.

@hayt Are you still having random power cycles ? and i have never seen those memory errors my guess the pc is talking about VRAM instead of normal RAM. Since your normal RAM seemed fine after the RAM test. And a new PSU is never a bad investment. So you didn't waste any money there. Also i just asked a colleague at worked and might think that it is CPU related so if you got a spare CPU lying around maybe try out a old CPU.

@hayt: Catching up on this thread now...but are you still using the GTX 580 with your new PSU? Because it's almost a guarantee that you'll get VRAM errors like that on new games like Wolfenstein 2 and Quantum Break. Quantum Break requires 2gb VRAM minimum, and Wolfenstein 2 is a whopping 4gb minimum. Both of which are above the 580s VRAM, I believe.

Have you tried using the 980ti with the new PSU? See if that works. Is it possible your GTX 980Ti was not properly seated before, causing a short on the board? That may have been causing some of the power cycles you were experiencing before.

EDIT: Also, with some quick googling, some folks are reporting corrupted user profile files that cause that windows security pop-up to occur. A windows disk scan/repair job could fix it. If you are experiencing crashes and slowness during loading screens this could also indicate your drive is bad and/or on its way out.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/46799-63-failure-display-security-shut-options-windows-64bit

EDIT 2: Nevermind, based on that error...it looks like you did indeed switch back to the 980ti. Have you tried using a different PCI-e lane on the motherboard? Maybe that is faulty and causing some issues.

Best of luck, duder. I just overcame some PC issues myself. It stinks to deal with, but once it's over, it's a good feeling to game smoothly at a crisp 1080/60. Cheers!

So I tried like 5 things including doing a very thorough format of everything and a few Microsoft chat sessions and well I don't want to jinx it but Battlefield 1 runs totally fine now. I haven't even tried Wolfenstein or Quantum Break because fuck it, I don't dare break the magic. Thanks for all your suggestions and FINGERS CROSSED I never have to bump this thread ever again.