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my computer is crashing, Help
Every time I play a high graphical game my computer freezes after 5 min play time and I have to reboot. I am talking games such as Shadow of Mordor, Elder scrolls online, Dragon age inquisition, even mass effect 3. this started happening about 3 weeks ago. I ran "unigine heaven" "3dmark" " memtest.org" and HDD scan and everything tests out good. I updated direct x, my anti virus reports no viruses, windows defender reports no spyware, I uninstalled Dragon age inquisition and all files that came with it because people have been reporting a ton of problems with it. I tried several different drivers to my ati 7870 it still crashes. Any ideas?
Comments
Open up your computer case and check how much dust it has collected and clean thouroughly all the dust out
make sure all the heat sinks around the CPU, Video card are nice and clean. Power supply also likes to pick up a lot of dust.
Sounds like a classic case of overheating
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
yeah sounds like Overheating to me.
Now, if your system is shutting down to prvent overheating, then you should check your fans and make sure all is clean. Reseat heatsinks with new thermale paste.
If the card is overheated, it is trash now.
Check your system temps before proceeding.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
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I have to agree with everyone else that it sounds like a heating problem. As others have suggested, cleaning the case and power supply of any dust as well as reapplying thermal paste to your CPU could help.
One other item that came to my mind that I have had happen before is the antivirus getting in the way. Now I know you mentioned that your antivirus hasn't found any issues but I have had issues with real-time scanning, where the antivirus scans things in the background, specifically highly used files and folders. I would suggest putting one of your said games into the exceptions list of you antivirus and then try playing the game. See if it continues to crash every 5 mins or so. If it doesn't try putting the other game directories into the exceptions list and that may solve your problem.
Other than that, I'm not sure what the issue could be. Check drivers, maybe a new driver for one of your pieces of hardware. I would almost reinstall the video card driver automatically incase of a corruption from a crash or something like that. Other than that would need more information.
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speccy. Ok I will down load and give a try
You're not really stressing the CPU with those games, the graphic card is the most likely culprit.
You say you've had the computer for 3 years
Have you ever blown the dust out of it over that 3 years?
If the answer is no, then all the fins on your heatsinks are probably loaded with dust. You should see the amount dust that comes out of computers just from a normal in home environment.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
I would be interested seeing that cpu temp as well. You could also use the free programs, hwmonitor and realtemp370 just to double check the heating issues. I got crashes on my machine not to long ago because the thermal paste on the cpu cooler died.
Ignore this part if you've said this already but did the machine freeze or just shut itself down? Did you get a bsod? Another thing to try would be a system restore before the point you installed DA:I uninstalling still leaves a lot of stuff.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
You need to clean around and in the fan. Also sometimes you need to take the fan off the CPU and clean under it as dust can get caked under the fan. Make sure you are grounded when you do this. If you dont have a grounding wrist band you can keep the PC plugged in and keep one hand on the case to keep you grounded. To me it sounds like heat. Also make sure all your fans are running. Sometimes they start to die and turn slow or stop working.
Hello OP,
As others have said, it could be overheating.
However ... I once had the exact same problem and thought it was overheating.
I downloaded all sorts of things, kept checking the temperature, turned the fans on high and cleaned the machine out.
As it turned out, believe it or not, my power supply needed to be replaced.
I can't tell you anything more than that but I remember coming across some info regarding a bad power supply. Since nothing else had worked I replaced the power supply and that fixed the issue.
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I would remove the graphics card and blow it out thoroughly. Most important that the fins on the heatsinks are nice and clean.
As already mentioned RealTemp is good app for checking temps run it while stressing you computer and observe the temps.
You can stress test your cpu with "Prime95" or "Aida64" and stress you GPU with FurMark
Stress the CPU and GPU independently to try and isolate the issue.
Getting all the dust out of your heatsinks is critical. Dust is by far the most common cause.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
This would be my second guess. Have you added any new hard drives or cards? Even external drives can take extra power from your power supply. CPUs needs a steady flow of power.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
When I was doing my research I read a lot of problems with the power supply from others. So, could be.
My cpu was 100c without running any games. So that was my problem.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I agree with most of what has been posted here:
It sounds like it's either temperature or power related.
Temperature, you can quickly eliminate that by posting temps (from any of a number of varioous programs that show your temps) - while you are doing something meaningful (playing a game, running a benchmark, etc). Under load, anything under 70C is great, 70-80C is passable (but you should look into improving it). Anything over 80C is suspect - some cards/parts can run up to 100C and be "ok", but in a mid-tower case or something similar, there's no reason anything should ever reasonably be running over 80C.
When you are checking your computer for dust, remember the PSU has a fan as well that needs to be checked. All fans should spin freely when turned off, and actually work when turned on. 18 months is proabaly a bit overdue for cleaning, even in a very clean environment. A typical computer probably needs to be opened up and at least checked out every 3-6 months, and much more frequently if you smoke, have pets, dusty environment, etc.
If your temps are good, that leaves power. There are actually 3 different parts to generic "power". The most important is obviously the power supply. Motherboards and video cards also have their own mini-power circuitry on them (usually called VRMs, or voltage regulation modules, pared with chokes, typically called "phases" on a motherboard), and these can fail independently of the PSU. What usually happens is the PSU is giving off dirty power - it's enough to run fans and every looks ok, but it's dirty enough that these more sensitive VRMs struggle on it and die - you replace the bad VRMs with a new part, and the new part fries again a few days/weeks/months later.
So I would replace the PSU out of principle - if nothing else it's a cheap insurance policy to give some piece of mind of another similar failure happening just a short time after this one. But you still need to figure out if it's the PSU, the video card, the motherboard, or some combination of the 3 that has actually failed.
My two favorite stress tests are Prime95 and Furmark - I monitor temps while running both of those. If your computer can run both of those at the same time, and not overheat or crash, your probably good.
If its still running hot after cleaning out all the dust, then 2 things, how good is your cooler, if its a stock cooler, their hardly ever worthy of anything other than the nearest dustbin, so replace it with something better, and if you do have decent cooling on the CPU, then chances are its time to renew the thermal paste, best not to scrimp on that one either! get a good quality one and make sure to clean off the old completely before adding new.
I would put my money on a bad power supply. Had this happen twice and both times the power supply was going bad.
650 is pretty low PS for a modern computer anyway.
Are you getting any error with the crash? Check your crash log and maybe post it for us.
Ok I just ran Furmark and the highest temp for the gpu was 64c so I do not think it is the graphics card, what type of Power supply would you guys recommend? where should I buy it? thanks for your help. I am not getting any error with the crash, just freezes and I have to reboot