[SOLVED] 50% of games hanging/crashing, struggling to narrow down issue

[Doug Purser]

Hello all,

Many thanks in advance for any help and apologies for the wall of text, I am slowly running out of options and wanted to be thorough
Really hoping that the below symptoms strike a cord with someone, and they may recognise something..

I have a self built system, this is my third and I have never really had issues previously.. I have had my current build for just over a year and its worked perfectly until now, and I have started to exhaust familiar options.

50% or so of my games crash fairly quickly, this was not happening 2-3 weeks back.
It started with Diablo 3 where the screen should just go black and stop rendering for 5-10 seconds, most the time it would actually recover, occasionally I would get a D3D error (direct X).
I also have Conan Exiles and The Forest, both of which freeze after 10-20 minutes of gameplay, again Conan references D3D or a render timeout in its logs. In these instances Conan hangs and hard crashes shortly after with an error message - the forest stops rendering the game but audio persists and anyone in my multiplayer game tells me I can still move and do things, I am given no errors.
In Conan I also seem to experience small micro stutters in FPS, which I had not done previously.

The rest of the system remains functional and I can restart the games (but naturally the same thing keeps happening).

Rough specs are as follows:
Intel i7 8700k (stock, not overclocked)
Gigabyte Aorus Z370 Ultra Gaming
32GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance 3000mhz
Asus Strix 1080 O8G
Kraken x52 CPU cooler
EVGA 500w G3 80+ Gold
x2 Crucial 500GB SSD
Windows 10 64Bit

I have tried the following to resolve the issue.

Reverting drivers to previous versions.
Reverting any changes in Nvidia control panel.
Re-downloading any trouble games, checking game file integrity.
Reformatting (keeping personal files).
Reformatting (again) but nuking from orbit (wipe and cleaning drives).
Flashing/Updating Mobo BIOS.
Installing games on another SSD in-case this was failing.
Removed and re-inserted RAM and GPU.

At this point I was convinced the GPU was faulty so I did a 25 minute Furmark benchmark (burn-in at x8 AA) - it was totally stable...
Switched my GPU into my girlfriends PC, and it worked beautifully in the games I mentioned above.

So now I am totally lost..

CAM shows my CPU and GPU thermals to be pretty good so I do not think my system is running hot.

I am about to try using MemTest86 overnight and Prime95 to test RAM and CPU but both programs are unfamiliar to me. (GPU 55c average and CPU 60-65c average).
Failing this I guess I will be switching out hardware, but was hoping there were smarter and faster ways to investigate.

I would really appreciate and value some help.

Again, many thanks in advance for any help and advice

 

[mdd1963]

I want to say I read something recently about stuttering being caused by the most recent GB Z390 BIOS, and that many were reverting back one version, etc....(something to consider/research, lest you pull your hair out with other 'fix attempts')

 

[mdd1963]

For hard crashes though, I'd try someone else's known good RAM, or just one of your RAM sticks at a time, and at lower clocks until we establish some stability

 

[Rexer]

Have you tried resetting the games or setting the games to default? Not the same as reinstalling. Games sometimes like to remember crashes the same as game settings. When the right criteria is met it triggers a crash. Make sure you write down your personal settings as they will be gone. Hope this helps.

 

[Doug Purser]

Have you tried resetting the games or setting the games to default? Not the same as reinstalling. Games sometimes like to remember crashes the same as game settings. When the right criteria is met it triggers a crash. Make sure you write down your personal settings as they will be gone. Hope this helps.

Hi Rexer, indeed I did was the first thing I tried sadly.

 

[Rexer]

I've been hearing a lot of 370 boards that came out last year were buggy. I myself had a problem with the an Asus RoG Strix Gaming Z370-H. Ram wasn't reporting in 3 slots and I called customer service to help trouble shoot it after getting 2 slots to register. They had me RMA it. They returned it with all 4 slots working saying they couldn't find a problem. But when I checked the bios version, it was changed, none I'd seen on the Asus site. A week later it was the latest bios version.
I think a lot had to do with AMD pushing out new CPUs faster than Intel could think. Intel countered this with a few new versions of the Lake series chip. This prompted board partners to hustle their production schemes so a lot of boards were partially tested before hitting the market. I'm sure by now the bios problems have been all tweaked but I ended up buying a second board to ensure myself I wasn't going to encounter the same problem. So far, it hasn't been a problem. 2017/2018 was bad year to build a new machine.
Did you try going into the Direct X to recover it? It's in the game files. Every game has it's own pathway into the registry to the DX files so I can't give you details on how to find it. But I do know you can reset/repair/update it.
Windows also has a tool to check Dx, too. Type Dxdiag in the search box.
You have a 500w psu. Even thou EVGA says the 1080 can run with a 500w, it's peaking at it's capability. Personally, I would upgrade that if you plan to clock it up a bit. Your PSU divides a single rail 12v to other 12v components and may not have enough watts to exploit sudden power draws. Add at least 100 watts (always more is better).
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-review,8.html

Hope this helps.

 

[Doug Purser]

For hard crashes though, I'd try someone else's known good RAM, or just one of your RAM sticks at a time, and at lower clocks until we establish some stability

Its worth trying for sure I did perform an overnight RAM test and it showed no errors in MemTest86, I also tried changing the clock speeds already, they were previously way below their advertised speeds when these issues started happening.

Prey crashed today also reporting a GPU hang, I am going to send my card back for repair under Asus recommendation, hopefully that resolves this somewhat.