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[Velius]

Guys I'm sorry to bug for advice but I'm getting a little worried about my rig. As some of you know, I have:

i5 4690K Devil's Canyon
16GB DDR3
GTX 1080
ASUS Z97-A Motherboard

So today I was playing Final Fantasy XIV, and my rig froze. It didn't bluescreen. It froze; image and sound, you know the sound.

I reset it. Started up again and froze while logging in.
Started it up AGAIN and got the Bluescreen, saying "We will restart it for you."
Then it loaded up fine. It's running right now.

Those of you who followed my Doom thread know that I encountered a couple freeze incidents there as well. And there have been one or two just random bluescreens ("We'll reset your comp for you") in the last month.

WHAT HAPPEN. Did someone set me up the bomb?

Any advice? I supposed my rig could use a good clean with a can of air, but I'm including my temps with CPUID, and I don't think it looks bad. Was playing FFXIV again and the CPU cores were hanging in the 50's celsius.

Is my hardware faulty? If so, which one? Is there even a way to determine that? If hardware is faulty wouldn't it just not work at all, instead of working great most of the time?

Stats included below:

 

[Akuji]

Its very hard to impossible to give an absolut answer from a distance. Clean up your software, maybe a windows format and reset your bios settings. Even if u never changed anything.

 

[xPikYx]

Well to understand if some component is faulty (not necessarely to the point it doesn't turn on, ie be unstable),you need to run some hardware test, but before than I would suggest some simple steps. First of all, are any of your components overclocked? If not, does your CPU have an iGPU? In case is the video card, you can run the PC with the integrated GPU and see if the problem appears again, if so the GPU is cause of instability (80% is the GPU the culprit since your freezes happened during game sess3), one of the reason why the GPU could freeze the whole system is abnormal temperature, the dissipation can't cope with the heat produced and the system starts throttling to the point it freeze, it might not be these the reason though, because the freezes are random and not specifics. I would suggest also in correspondence with the freeze, to check out the event viewer registry where the SO shows any error occurred

 

[Bonfires Down]

Yeah, try to format the drive and reinstall Windows. It's a good idea to do so anyway if you haven't for a while. Just make sure your shit is backed up as not all games support cloud saves

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

This is why I hate PC gaming and regret that I advised my friend to buy that Alienware Rig.

 

[Velius]

Well to understand if some component is faulty (not necessarely to the point it doesn't turn on, ie be unstable),you need to run some hardware test, but before than I would suggest some simple steps. First of all, are any of your components overclocked? If not, does your CPU have an iGPU? In case is the video card, you can run the PC with the integrated GPU and see if the problem appears again, if so the GPU is cause of instability (80% is the GPU the culprit since your freezes happened during game sess3), one of the reason why the GPU could freeze the whole system is abnormal temperature, the dissipation can't cope with the heat produced and the system starts throttling to the point it freeze, it might not be these the reason though, because the freezes are random and not specifics. I would suggest also in correspondence with the freeze, to check out the event viewer registry where the SO shows any error occurred

I was doing some OC'ing before but I've since stopped since games are starting to optimize very well.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what an iGPU is. Is that the on-board graphics?

 

[NoMoChokeSJ]

Reset your bios to factory settings. Oc'ing RAM always seems to be the culprit for me with freezing

 

[xPikYx]

I was doing some OC'ing before but I've since stopped since games are starting to optimize very well.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what an iGPU is. Is that the on-board graphics?

It is indeed, if you overclocked your GPU reset the values to default, you might have left them unchanged by mistake, try that and let me know please

 

[TaySan]

Sounds like an unstable overclock. Reset everything back to stock. Do a memtest on your Ram.

 

[Velius]

Sounds like an unstable overclock. Reset everything back to stock. Do a memtest on your Ram.

Is this done in the bios?

 

[xPikYx]

Is this done in the bios?

Yes

 

[TaySan]

Is this done in the bios?

Yes in the bios for CPU and RAM overclocks. You might have to reinstall Windows too if the BSODs corrupted anything. I had this problem too and the culprit was my memory.

 

[Velius]

Okay so here are some of the things I'm seeing. First: HOW do I know if they're overclocked? Second: should I go for the "Load Optimized Defaults"?

 

[Velius]

TaySan xPikYx Above post.

By the way thank you all so much for your help. You guys are the best

 

[TaySan]

Okay so here are some of the things I'm seeing. First: HOW do I know if they're overclocked? Second: should I go for the "Load Optimized Defaults"?

Looks like your CPU is definitely overclocked. Click "load optimized defaults" and that should put everything back to stock.

 

[Armorian]

Could be PSU related, what do you have?

 

[LOLCats]

bro check windows event viewer. if it says unexpected shutdown likely power supply, however if it says bad block (disk dying) or some critical OS issue, memory exception (bad oc), google correspondingly.

in the event viewer, focus on windows system events then look at application if nothing found (in system). completely ignore the security section for this troubleshooting.

 

[Velius]

bro check windows event viewer. if it says unexpected shutdown likely power supply, however if it says bad block (disk dying) or some critical OS issue, memory exception (bad oc), google correspondingly.

I checked it, but where exactly do I look?

 

[Velius]

Looks like your CPU is definitely overclocked. Click "load optimized defaults" and that should put everything back to stock.

Okay, I reset it. Funny thing is when I restarted it to go back into bios I wasn't quick enough and it proceeded to go to the startup where... it froze again.

So now the bios is at the optimized defaults!

 

[Velius]

Could be PSU related, what do you have?

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[LOLCats]

I checked it, but where exactly do I look?

see my edit, fixed that just moments after post.

go to the exact time stamp it crashed first and look for "red" critical events. mostly ignore "white" info events for this troubleshooting, "yellow" warns events can mostly be ignored. unexpected shutdown is a critical event as well as memory events

tldr; look for red events in windows system events.

 

[Can't decide]

Since it's overclocked, the first thing I'd check is whether the CPU (or even RAM) is getting enough voltage, then I'd check to see if one of the RAM sticks are going bad.

 

[Velius]

see my edit, fixed that just moments after post.

go to the exact time stamp it crashed first and look for "red" critical events. mostly ignore "white" info events for this troubleshooting, "yellow" warns events can mostly be ignored. unexpected shutdown is a critical event as well as memory events

tldr; look for red events in windows system events.

Okay I'm seeing a couple things. First is:

ERROR: Service Control Manager- "The Origin Web Helper Service service terminated unexpectedly."

Another is
CRITICAL: "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed or lost power unexpectedly."

 

[TaroYamada]

I went through this recently, my issue was sadly the 5700 XT. A card I wanted to love but had to ship back to Dell. Black screens, lock ups, etc. etc. I went to a Nvidia card which also has issues with my setup but has only crashed once in ~3 months, where as the 5700 XT was a reliable crash every few days and sometimes multiple times in one day.

I think the issue for both cards was my dual monitor set-up, HDR/Freesync on one and neither on the other. If I full screen a video on the second monitor with the Nvidia card, the entire screen turns black/white but most importantly, it doesn't crash like the 5700 did.

Anyways good luck.

 

[LOLCats]

Okay I'm seeing a couple things. First is:

ERROR: Service Control Manager- "The Origin Web Helper Service service terminated unexpectedly."

Another is
CRITICAL: "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed or lost power unexpectedly."

the second is relevant, that is an unexpected shutdown. look for any preceeding critical events. scroll through all the reds make sure you dont see any disk bad blocks or other "sea of red events" aka "a shit load of red events"

but if its also hang/freeze before windows, youre looking at some hardware issue, power supply or power transmission issue. which the unexpected windows shutdown event would correlate to. seems like a nice psu (i have a g2 750), doesnt mean it cant go bad but you could maybe bypass your power strip.

for what its worth the origin web helper event is a result of the unexpected pc shutdown

 

[nkarafo]

This is why I hate PC gaming and regret that I advised my friend to buy that Alienware Rig.

git gud

 

[TaySan]

This is why I hate PC gaming and regret that I advised my friend to buy that Alienware Rig.

PC gaming pro tip: Don't mess with overclocking anything unless you know what you are doing and have the time and patience to troubleshoot things when something goes wrong. I learned that the hard way with my 3900x build.

 

[digital_ghost]

This is why I hate PC gaming and regret that I advised my friend to buy that Alienware Rig.

This is why I have my gaming PC in the cloud. If hardware fails, the cloud company replaces it with no cost on my end.

 

[LOLCats]

This is why I have my gaming PC in the cloud. If hardware fails, the cloud company replaces it with no cost on my end.

zing!

 

[Velius]

the second is relevant, that is an unexpected shutdown. look for any preceeding critical events. scroll through all the reds make sure you dont see any disk bad blocks or other "sea of red events" aka "a shit load of red events"

but if its also hang/freeze before windows, youre looking at some hardware issue, power supply or power transmission issue. which the unexpected windows crash event would correlate to. seems like a nice psu (i have a g2 750), doesnt mean it cant go bad but you could maybe bypass your power strip.

for what its worth the origin web helper event is a result of the unexpected pc shutdown

Alright a BUNCH of stuff happened, all in the same second but none of it looks like errors... just "information".
Filter manager stuff, Ntfs, SRTSP, Kernel-General and Kernel boot

 

[Northeastmonk]

When it turned blue did it flash with what crashed? You could take the minidumps into a blue screen viewer and see what crashed.

Blue screen of death (STOP error) information in dump files.

Displays information about blue screen crashes occured on your system. (MiniDump Reader)

www.nirsoft.net

In event viewer you can also filter the warnings and errors, off to the right it says filter by, check those boxes, and hit ok. Otherwise you’ll see a bunch of stuff that might be irrelevant.

If I were you I’d google those critical events. There are some general shutdown messages that won’t tell you much except the system shutdown. Kernel power lost is the core shutting down. That appears when the entire PC shuts down in a bad way.

 

[Velius]

So I played about 30 minutes of games just now, Doom Eternal and FFXIV.

No problems and the CPU's were cooler this time. Not unexpected, but I'll keep you guys updated.

 

[LOLCats]

Alright a BUNCH of stuff happened, all in the same second but none of it looks like errors... just "information".
Filter manager stuff, Ntfs, SRTSP, Kernel-General and Kernel boot

ya thats all startup stuff. good luck

 

[Velius]

ya thats all startup stuff. good luck

Is that bad news? Am I fucked?

 

[longdi]

you should use hwinfo monitoring firstly.
hwmonitor sucks.

looks like overclocking issue, 4.7ghz is kinda high without proper tweaking.

 

[888]

What does Event Viewer say under System\errors?

 

[LOLCats]

Is that bad news? Am I fucked?

if it keeps happening youll have to figure out if the psu or power strip is at fault.

 

[kittoo]

What is that 124 degree max temperature in TMPIN4? Thats too much! Maybe thats whats causing the crashes.

 

[888]

What is that 124 degree max temperature in TMPIN4? Thats too much! Maybe thats whats causing the crashes.

The value and min are empty. Probably an unused temp sensor if I took a quick guess.

 

[888]

OP. Search event viewer for NVKDLLM. This sounds like some crashing I had from a faulty psu when my gpu was under load. It could also be a bad GPU. Both of those times I got the NVKDLLM events. I’ve also seen similar behavior from bad drivers. You may need to run DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) to blow away the GPU drivers and install fresh ones.

Does it lock under load or only when load is put on the system?

 

[SLoWMoTIoN]

This is why I hate PC gaming and regret that I advised my friend to buy that Alienware Rig.

DonJorginho ?

 

[Shakka43]

Maybe the vcore is set too low for your cpu at that high of a frequency, lack of continuous power can cause the CPU to restart the computer to prevent damage.
I had consistent trouble with random restarts from my PC a few months ago and the only thing that worked for me was adjusting the vcore from Auto to a manual higher value. Obviously you should be very careful when tinkering with this.

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

DonJorginho ?

He's smarter than I am, senpai.

 

[Twinguistics]

Good luck op. This looks a lot like my thread, except this isn't a new rig and it's not a laptop either. I'll be reading with interest as part of my Gaf pc gaming 101 course lol.

 

[rofif]

I would re-seat ram and reinstall windows

 

[The Bloody-Nine]

My PC was freezing when I started playing games a few weeks ago. No blue screens, just a freeze, which required a hard reset. I tried everything. Tested and stress tested every component where it was possible to do so. Ran MSI Afterburner to see what temps were at when it was freezing. Nothing out of the ordinary. Turns out it WAS the CPU overheating, but the freeze set in before temps were able to update on screen accordingly. Changed the thermal paste and it was fine, though I changed the AIO, too, just to be on the safe side. No freezes since. It might just have been the fucking thermal paste alone, as I didn't get any freezes before the new AIO arrived. However, a stress test after switching the paste gave me a temp of 87 degrees on one core, at one point, so better safe than sorry.

 

[Armorian]

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It's good PSU so it shoudn't be the culprit unless it's faulty. I would focus on RAM and hard drive:

- check RAM with memtest running from USB https://www.memtest86.com/
- check SSD/HDD for bad sectors

The "beauty" of PCs that it could literally be fucking EVERYTHING but usually the suspects are: CPU, RAM, PSU, storage

 

[888]

It's good PSU so it shoudn't be the culprit unless it's faulty. I would focus on RAM and hard drive:

- check RAM with memtest running from USB https://www.memtest86.com/
- check SSD/HDD for bad sectors

The "beauty" of PCs that it could literally be fucking EVERYTHING but usually the suspects are: CPU, RAM, PSU, storage

My post above about a bad psu was a Supernova 850 platinum. Good PSUs can go bad.

 

[LemmingWithaParachute]

Its very hard to impossible to give an absolut answer from a distance. Clean up your software, maybe a windows format and reset your bios settings. Even if u never changed anything.

I would re-seat ram and reinstall windows

Yeah, try to format the drive and reinstall Windows. It's a good idea to do so anyway if you haven't for a while. Just make sure your shit is backed up as not all games support cloud saves

No its not. Windows has come far enough that its capable of keeping itself relatively clean enough to not affect performance, more so if its installed on an SSD as no longer needing to defrag or atleast anywhere as often.


This whole jump straight to reinstalling windows needs to stop.

Its 9.5/10 completely unnecessary not to mention lazy. This is why people end up asking on a message board as they never bothered to figure anything out and learn something new.

A hardware fault isnt going to be fixed by a fresh windows install. No point in wasting time and reinstalling windows + updates + VCredist/Dx and everything else, before youve ruled out hardware faults. More ofthen than not, youre going to end up with compatibility problems after a fresh install as you now dont have the all the runtime/VCredist/DX distributes installed as only the latest one are downloaded through Windows update meaning older games and programs will often throw up variations of missing dlls ( MSVCP100.dll for example is related to VC2012)

 

[Gavin Stevens]

Wait... WAIT...

I've been modelling these past few days a new skeleton in 3ds max, and every so often i would get... FREEZING. But, it would freeze, the monitor would just look frozen, but sound would carry on playing in the background and nothing would change? Only fix was a hard reset, as it never came back, not even with ctrl-alt-delete! This has now happened in other things too, usually when I'm using the GPU for something, but only in the last few days. I was thinking a driver issue.

Thank FUCK its not just me. I'm on nvidia drivers 445.87 with a GeForce 2080ti, no overclocking on anything though I am using Afterburner with custom fan profiles to keep things a bit more cool, average temp under windows load is low.