Question Abrupt System Restarts While Gaming

The Survivor

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Dec 16, 2013
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Hi there,

Here are my current specs:
  1. CPU - Ryzen 5 3600 no-OC (have also tested a Ryzen 5 3600XT)
  2. Motherboard - Gigabyte Aorus Elite X570 (originally a MSI Tomahawk B450 board)
  3. RAM - Crucial Ballistix 16GB @ 3200MHz (previously was Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB @3200MHz). The ram is currently running at default speeds - 2667MHz with XMP off.
  4. GPU - Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700XT Gaming OC 8G rev 1.0 (RMA'd the card and all they said was it was fine. The tests listed were just benchmarks like FurMark).
  5. PSU - Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 750W 80+ Gold (was originally a Corsair CXM 750W 80+ Bronze)
  6. Storage - 860 EVO 1TB, Seagate Barracuda 2TB HDD
  7. CPU cooler - be quiet! dark rock 3
  8. General cooling - 4x120mm fans connected through a hub controlling RGB, etc.

Here's the timeline of my PC absolutely hating me:
1. In April of 2020 I ordered new parts, consisting of the CPU & GPU listed above and the parts listed as "previous". I switched off a 1060 6GB and an i3 - 8350K with a slight OC. When I received my parts, the GPU came first, and so I put it in my existing computer. After this, my computer would start crashing and rebooting just how it does today. Seems like a pretty obvious problem, but here I am over a year down the line with the same card.

2. When I fully assembled the PC, I would continue to experience abrupt system reboots during gaming, with the majority of them being in 2560x1440 resolution. 1920x1080 seemed to be completely stable, and to this day I've experienced fewer crashes on it. Though I haven't really tested many games in 1080 recently as it seems my PC will choose some days to trigger crash after crash.

3. While I'm gaming, going through the loading screen of a game, or pretty much doing anything with a game open on my PC, there's a good chance that both my monitors will go black, a repetitive sound glitch will play, then my system reboots. The PC doesn't turn off during this as all lights stay on and it simply goes straight into rebooting. I often times get a AMD driver timeout as well, and when this happens it appears the same as my system rebooting. The only difference is while both monitors go black, I still have sound, and my PC will soon recover. All I have to do in this case is close the applications that were open. I will add, however, that after the driver timeout happens I'm more likely to experience a system reboot.

4. I have gotten new parts/tested new parts in every category besides the GPU. It and my SSD are the only two components that are not new, even though my parts previously were new. Gigabyte basically told me when I RMA'd the card that it passed their tests fine, which were really just benchmarks that I could run myself. I have contacted AMD support but they don't give me much besides "freshly install the GPU driver, install Windows updates, reset your PC, try a new part if you can." I've reset my PC about 4 times since it was built in April and so far not much stability has been gained. OVER TIME MY SYSTEM DID SEEM TO CRASH LESS AS I WAS ABLE TO PLAY GAMES THAT WOULD PREVIOSULY CRASH UPON LOADING OR JUST A FEW MINUTES IN. The exception to this is Minecraft, which, as of two days ago, has crashed my system about 11 times. Many of these crashes occurred back to back.

5. 99% of the time a WHEA logger event shows up at/just after the time of my system crash. They are all along the lines of this:

A fatal hardware error has occurred.

Reported by component: Processor Core
Error Source: Machine Check Exception
Error Type: Cache Hierarchy Error
Processor APIC ID: 13 <- this number changes with every one, so it cycles through the same numbers often.

6. That mostly covers it. I'm waiting for a friend to loan me a GPU so I can test if I just went through a year of troubleshooting for no reason, but that'll be a few weeks. Otherwise, here's some other fixes I've tried: Turning PBO off, manually setting RAM voltage to Motherboard's listed spec, XMP on/off, different power plans including the 1usmus power plan, turned off FreeSync (it causes flickering on monitor and I hate it so much), changed cables, reset the Motherboard to default, updated BIOS to F33g ( a release from March. Soon after doing this my PC became completely unstable and I had to switch my RAM as it was shooting out errors w/ Windows Memory tool), and more. I've tried a lot, although I think I maybe tried too much and ignored obvious signs.

I'm always willing to give more information or expand on what I've said. I might be able to post a few memory dumps/logs, my PC very rarely actually records them as the PC shuts down too abruptly.

Thanks for reading,
Have a nice day.
 
Do you still have the GTX 1060? I would plop it back in, if the issues go away you isolate to the GPU, or some software conflict.

You say you've re-installed the OS from scratch several times? That rules out the normal practice of DDU to switch from Nvidia to AMD.

Power supply seems adequate.

Does it crash regularly in things like 3D Mark, FurMark etc? If not, and only in games, I would start looking closely at the sound drivers.

Try disabling your sound card in the BIOS and see if the problem goes away. If so, get a dedicated sound card.
 
Im so glad i saw this post because now im not the only one with this problem anymore.
Well... i have the same problem since around June-July 2020 when i bought the whole components at once.

My Setup:
CPU: Ryzen 7 3700x
Motherboard: MSI x470 Gaming Plus Max
Ram: G.Skill Dimm 32GB DDR4-3200 Kit
GPU: MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming X 8GB
PSU: BeQuiet! Straight Power 11 750W Gold 80+
Storage: Crucial P1 SSD 1TB
CPU Cooler is the same that AMD gave me with the CPU
General cooling: 3x Corsair LL120 RGB // Argus RGB-Fan Set RS-04 (dont buy these they are <Mod Edit>)
Monitor 1: MSI MAG271CQR
Monitor 2: VW222 -DVI-D

I tried:
Reinstalling Windows three or more times
Reinstalling new and old versions of drivers
Turning on CPU visualization and XMP (dont ask)
Sending a crash-report from the driver
Probably some more Stuff but i cant remember

My PC doesnt always shut down but i have blackscreen and as well not always that weird Sound. After that a driver crash-report pops up. While having the blackscreen my friends on discord cant hear me and i cant hear them.
It also gives me blackscreen sometimes when i watch youtube after that blackscreen it shows the whole browser black except the bookmarks and up. My Driver also tells me on every game that the performance is Marginal -60 fps even if i play on lowest graphics
 
Last edited:
Hello There, I am having the EXACT same problem AND the same GPU, same symptoms, same problems, if you ever find a fix to this please let me know and i'll do the same if i found one aswell.
 
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Do you still have the GTX 1060? I would plop it back in, if the issues go away you isolate to the GPU, or some software conflict.

You say you've re-installed the OS from scratch several times? That rules out the normal practice of DDU to switch from Nvidia to AMD.

Power supply seems adequate.

Does it crash regularly in things like 3D Mark, FurMark etc? If not, and only in games, I would start looking closely at the sound drivers.

Try disabling your sound card in the BIOS and see if the problem goes away. If so, get a dedicated sound card.

Hi there,

Unfortunately I don't have the card with me anymore, but coming up soon here I'll be able to test a new card. I've also tested in FurMark and Unigine Heaven, and I believe out of the tens of times I've run them there has only been one crash similar to what I described, and that was about a month after I built the system. I'll go ahead and start checking sound drivers just to make sure, thanks for that!
 
Im so glad i saw this post because now im not the only one with this problem anymore.
Well... i have the same problem since around June-July 2020 when i bought the whole components at once.

My Setup:
CPU: Ryzen 7 3700x
Motherboard: MSI x470 Gaming Plus Max
Ram: G.Skill Dimm 32GB DDR4-3200 Kit
GPU: MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming X 8GB
PSU: BeQuiet! Straight Power 11 750W Gold 80+
Storage: Crucial P1 SSD 1TB
CPU Cooler is the same that AMD gave me with the CPU
General cooling: 3x Corsair LL120 RGB // Argus RGB-Fan Set RS-04 (dont buy these they are <Mod Edit>)
Monitor 1: MSI MAG271CQR
Monitor 2: VW222 -DVI-D

I tried:
Reinstalling Windows three or more times
Reinstalling new and old versions of drivers
Turning on CPU visualization and XMP (dont ask)
Sending a crash-report from the driver
Probably some more Stuff but i cant remember

My PC doesnt always shut down but i have blackscreen and as well not always that weird Sound. After that a driver crash-report pops up. While having the blackscreen my friends on discord cant hear me and i cant hear them.
It also gives me blackscreen sometimes when i watch youtube after that blackscreen it shows the whole browser black except the bookmarks and up. My Driver also tells me on every game that the performance is Marginal -60 fps even if i play on lowest graphics

Hi,

It's a terrible problem to have isn't it! My radeon software usually says the same thing for me in games, though when I'm playing them they seem fine. I know one issue that can lead to black screens/reboots/crashes during general PC usage is the RAM. If you haven't already, I would try to run MemTest or Window's own built in Memory Diagnostic Tool just to make sure. My RAM started to go bad and eventually my PC almost wouldn't install anything correctly, plus I was getting black screens during normal use and gaming much more frequently.

I swear though, if it isn't the GPU, it's definitely bad software/a bad interaction between software and hardware. Those driver timeouts/driver crashes have started to appear more frequently for me. Hopefully we can find a solution for our problems soon!