• PC freezing up or doing full restarts at completely random times
    28 replies, posted
My PC started being a cunt around two weeks ago and I don't even know where to start troubleshooting as it could literally be anything. First off, here are the specs: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/483/1f89a9b2-77fc-4738-a06e-0755d73bdd90/image.png + 750 Watt power supply, also CPU is overclocked to 4.2 GHz but it's been like that for years now. Intel iGPU is disabled in the BIOS. What has been happening lately is that the PC WILL at least either crash or freeze once each day. The odd thing however is that if it crashes it completely shuts down first, as in all fans and drives stop spinning and 5 seconds later it starts up by itself again. However when the pc freezes and I press the reset button it also does a complete shutdown first before starting up again. Friends told me the power supply might be fucked because I've recently upgraded the GPU from a GTX 660, but that doesn't make any sense because the crashes/freezes happen 100% randomly. It can happen while watching a youtube video, rendering a video, playing a game or even when doing absolutely nothing. As in I start up my pc, log into windows, lie in bed checking stuff on my phone and then hear how the pc just shuts down and starts up again. The timing on the crashes are also completely random, sometimes happening within the first hour the PC is on for the day, sometimes 5 hours later. I'm guessing the mainboard is faulty but I don't know how to test it. I will try memtest later though just in case, but I'm guessing the ram is fine since at worst the pc would bluescreen if the ram was faulty, wouldn't it? Would be sick if someone knew what to try out now because I can't have a computer that I work with crash all the time, lost enough progress on my projects already. Also money is tight so I hope it's nothing major. huge TIA
Why is your SSD running so hot compared to all the others? Is that the drive your OS is on?
Yeah it's my main drive, I dont really know why it's that hot except for maybe poor ventilation in my PC case.
Well, just to be sure, remove the OC on your CPU. I recently got a few BSOD-s in a row on my i5 3570k and they went away when I reset the clocks.
are 10 minutes enough? it's getting rather warm in here. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/483/e485f7ec-3dd1-4ee5-9dd3-2b1df5e4e7bc/image.png
This is kind of a long shot, but have you checked that all of your power cables are properly secured? I would get random crashes on my PC and that was the issue.
I'll check the cables before going to sleep, I could've moved something during the gpu installation.
Had the same problem a bit ago, turns out the cpu was overheating from a dead fan, might be worth an open-case check even though the stress test probably rules that out.
Ok so I have two things that I can try out. The first one being to remove the Wifi and the PCI audio interface that I rarely use anyway, the second being to update the bios. If neither fixes the problem then I'll probably have to get new stuff, and that means I'll have to spend over 600€ for a good Ryzen cpu, mainboard and 16gb RAM, and I really reallyyy don't want to spend 600€ on my computer as it's still a pretty good pc and not quite worth the upgrade just yet.
Definitely try booting without any PCIe devices installed. PCIe is not a hot-swappable interface and plugging in or removing any PCIe devices while your PC is on will crash your OS completely. Which means that malfunctioning PCIe devices have the power to bring your entire system down with them if they have small hiccups. So if your sound card or something has a hardware issue, it can cause total shutdowns. I once had a USB expansion PCI card slowly fail on me in my old XP machine, I was ready to write the whole system off because of constant BSODs and it turned out to just be a dying controller on that card. Weird stuff.
Alright removed both PCI cards, now all I gonna do is wait until something happens. I've noticed my ssd is just lying there between the other hard drives but the drives were cooler than the ssd so why would it run so hot? Hmm https://i.imgur.com/wzpKkRp.jpg This entire PC is a mess
I had a similar problem with a faulty PSU which was shorting on the motherboard, it'd force my PC to restart at random. I'd remove the power cables from the motherboard and see if there's any discolouration or black marks on the connectors just to be sure. I've had faulty ram and overheating CPU's in the past as well, but they'd either bsod or trip my PC into shutting down rather than restarting.
Good lord. Is... is that an IDE cable i see in there? And your hard drives aren't mounted either? No rear fan and I doubt there is a front fan. Bro, you've pushed what I assume in an OEM case past the limit.
Haha no that's the cable that connects the pci audio interface with the I/O box that is mounted in the front. The case is open all the time anyway so I dont bother with fans, the case was a gift anyway so I couldn't care less. The drives are thrown in there because the mounting method of the drives is absolutely retarded I hate it and I will refuse to mount anything unless I happened to get a better case on sale somewhere.
Ok so removing the PCI devices didn't help, now I don't know what to do. It did however take around 7 hours until it crashed, but that doesn't mean anything as it's still completely random.
I'm willing to bet it's the motherboard but have you tried running it idle and at load to see if that makes a difference? If it's totally random and doesn't crash more frequently under load, I'd suspect the motherboard. If it frequently crashes under load, I might suspect the PSU.
All restart stuff I've ever run into has either been the result of overheating or bad HDD/SSD. If it was ram your PC should BSOD rather than simply restart. Rather than removing things one a time a time (ie - remove PCI devices, then X then Y) just remove everything that isn't necessary to boot including mouse and once its up, keyboard. If it still dies after that then what @AtomicSans mentioned is going to determine your issue pretty much spot on.
My go-to test for PSU stability/overall power stability is Furmark on low settings at 720p + OCCT with Small Data Set. It's an incredibly unrealistic workload but if your system has power delivery issues of any kind, that combination will make that really clear to you, really quick.
yeah it has to be my motherboard, bios is up to date but it's very choppy to use, sometimes the cursor moves fine but other times it freezes and I have to wait a little before it comes back to life. I would like to leave my pc running idle with barely anything plugged in but I don't think it would change anything or even help me find the issue. Maybe after like 7 years of constant daily use it's giving up? I may try and get a motherboard somewhere that my cpu fits on but it will probably be a used one so that will suck and maybe still not fix the issue.
I know this may be out of left field but have you tried a system file check?
Also try running memory test. Bad memory usually causes blue screens, but its good to rule it out. No need to throw out the motherboard if its just a bad RAM stick.
Two days ago before I started using my PC I've reset the bios and so far I'm getting no crashes or freezes. I don't understand how some overclock that was being used for over 2 years now suddenly caused problems. From what I can tell this issue seems to be finally over but who knows maybe it will come back.
I had this exact problem around the same time. Swapped out my Ram, ran disk check. Literally tried everything I found online. I thought my motherboard was failing. Ended up doing a complete reinstall of windows which fixed it completely. Pretty sure the most recent update corrupted something in windows. At first it was just causing a bsod and then restart. It was only about a week ago it just started completely failing to boot and was just stuck restarting and failing to load completely.. Reinstalled via usb and haven't had a single problem since. Hope you get it fixed anyway my dude.
ok so the issue hasn't come back yet so I think it's safe to say that resetting the bios back to factory defaults has fixed it. Dunno why it helped but it did. So, who wants those 50 coins? first one to post here gets em
ehhhheeeeeeeeeehehhhehehhh
told you remove the OC. May also be some random power delivery option but who knows. VRM-s can go bad from heat cycles etc, probably something like that giving up.
actually yeah you're right lmao scammed yall
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