Black screen while pc still running, freezes and blue screen of death when gaming.

[alek2211]

Hello. My 2,5 year old pc is recently starting to bug on me alot. When i play CS:GO i tend to get often random freezes following by a black screen and a soundloop for about 4 seconds which repeats pretty often. When i play League of Legends, i often get a sudden black screen even though the pc i still running, so i have to do a hard turn off. Just recently, i've gotten a blue screen of death while playing CS:GO so i am desperate for a fix. I've tried to set my monitor to never go to sleep mode, reinstalled my video driver, checked for ram problems and checked if my video card is overheating (which it's not, since it is constantly sitting at a 40-70 celcius)
My specs are:
AMD radeon HD 6950 card
Intel quad core 2 - 2.83 GHz
8 GB ram
Powersupply is 750 Watt at max

There is also a light on the motherboard that is yellow. i dont know what it means, maybe it's my motherboard that is fucked?

 

[Vynavill]

The BSoD should have presented you with a message, a brief name of the error that happened. What was that?

Also, it might be nice to check for manuals on your motherboard manufacturer's website, as that yellow light may mean anything, from warning you that something is wrong to simply making you notice the card is correctly receiving power.

 

[alek2211]

The BSoD should have presented you with a message, a brief name of the error that happened. What was that?

Also, it might be nice to check for manuals on your motherboard manufacturer's website, as that yellow light may mean anything, from warning you that something is wrong to simply making you notice the card is correctly receiving power.

Yes it did but i didnt get to write down what it was and now i dont know how to find the BSoD text..
I checked the yellow light and it only means that my motherboard is running, so thats not an issue.

 

[alek2211]

The BSoD has only happened once, but the monitor goes black while pc still turned on is now happening on almost every game (even hearthstone), after 5-10 minutes. This of course only happens when im playing a game. When i'm browsing the internet, everythings fine. I have also now tried a different monitor and that doesn't fix the problem, so i'm beginning to think that i have to reset my pc back to factory settings. If that doesn't work i'll just buy a better (and newer) graphics card and see if that fixes the issue.

 

[Vynavill]

Hmm try this. The next time a black screen occur, take note of the time. Go to the control panel of your windows installation and look for "administration tools", then run the event viewer.

You should see various options on the tree menu on the left. Select "administrative events" (or something like that, my OS isn't in english).
Look for any error, message or warning under that time.
I suspect the video drivers are acting up, with windows dropping them and trying to recover them. That usually works out in a black screen, or a blue one if it doesn't manage to recover them successfully. It usually happens on unstable overclocks, on bad PSUs or on corrupted drivers.

As a side note, don't go buy something new unless you're certain it's broken and unrecoverable...
Buying a "better" GPU (a 6950 IS a good one, depending on the partner you bought it from) will fix nothing if the issue is somewhere else, and can risk ruining your new investment as well...

 

[alek2211]

Hmm try this. The next time a black screen occur, take note of the time. Go to the control panel of your windows installation and look for "administration tools", then run the event viewer.

You should see various options on the tree menu on the left. Select "administrative events" (or something like that, my OS isn't in english).
Look for any error, message or warning under that time.
I suspect the video drivers are acting up, with windows dropping them and trying to recover them. That usually works out in a black screen, or a blue one if it doesn't manage to recover them successfully. It usually happens on unstable overclocks, on bad PSUs or on corrupted drivers.

As a side note, don't go buy something new unless you're certain it's broken and unrecoverable...
Buying a "better" GPU (a 7950 IS a good one, depending on the partner you bought it from) will fix nothing if the issue is somewhere else, and can risk ruining your new investment as well...

So i did what you told me and the following issue errors or failures showed up:
The only critical error was a Kernel Power error that said your pc randomly turned off. The failure name is /driver/WUDFRd and the driver name is" WpdBusEnumRoot\UMB\2&37c186b&0&STORAGE#VOLUME#_??_USBSTOR#DISK&VEN_DELL&PROD_USB___HS-CF_CARD&REV_7.08#000001025CF7&0# "
No idea what that is but i suspect it was just an error the popped up when i hard restarted the pc.
The other errors happened wierdly 10 seconds after this "critical restart error" which were two EventLog errors which just states that the hard system reboot that i had to perform after the black screen was unexpected. So everything that happened from the black screen and 1 minute after was pretty much errors coming from my hard reboot that i had to perform. Only error i find suspicious is one that popped up 2 minutes after the black screen which is a "WMI error" that states the following: Event filter with query "SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_Processor" AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99" could not be reactivated in namespace "//./root/CIMV2" because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected.

I also recieved a Kernel_PnP error that says some driver couldn't be loaded. The ID of this failure is 219 and the driver that couldn't load is again; /driver/WUDFRd
Heres a link the the error ID: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3164.event-id-219-windows-kernel-pnp.aspx

Do i have a corrupt driver that needs replacing or can i repair this by maybe restoring my pc back to factory settings or send it to a repair shop?
Best regards, Alexander

 

[alek2211]

I just read about this error 219 and i is something that can happen when you turn on your pc. This happens to my pc every time i turn it off, so it is either an error that is not really important or the error that fucks my pc up whenever i try to play a game. Maybe a slow latency between motherboard and GPU? I'm lending a friends GTX 280 on sunday to see if its my GPU that is acting up. If it isn't i'll try reseting my pc back to factory settings and if that doesnt work EITHER, i suspect it will have to be an issue with my motherboard, since my CPU and PSU is strong enough for my graphics card (750 watt PSU)

 

[Vynavill]

- Anything hard-reset related could be safely ignored.
- The "SELECT *" message is log-related and is just a delay issue between bootup time and the execution of that specific operation.
- Similar stuff is happening with the WUDFRD error. Some PNP drivers are not loading up fast enough and suffer a delay between the system's load up and theirs. If you just see one entry, they likely get recovered soon after, enabling what I assume is a multimedia card reader, judging by the message.

If there's no message related to the GPU, the fault may be somewhere else. Do try with that 280, although something closer to the 6950 would be better...
At best, it'll rule out the GPU.

The PSU is actually the next in line. When you get a power supply you're indeed looking for enough juice to fuel your system, but you need to make sure the power also comes in clean. Having high wattage is essentially useless if voltage or current can spike at random due to its bad constructive quality.
What's the model and manufacturer of that unit?

 

[Kademlia]

Sounds like the video drivers that are failing which finally lead to a BSOD from them getting corrupted. Best thing to do would be to uninstall them completely by using the add or remove programs.

First go and find the latest version of your drives and download the setup.

Like i said before uninstall them from the add or remove programs "appwiz.cpl" once you do that then goto device manager and expand the "display adapters" and there should only be one. Go ahead and right click on it and click "uninstall." After that do a restart. The legacy drives will kick in and will notice the resolution is really low making everything look big. Run the setup and install the drives. Once that is complete restart your computer again. Once the computer comes back up you will have to configure any graphics settings in windows that you may have had. Then try and play the game once again and see if the issue is resolved.

 

[alek2211]

- Anything hard-reset related could be safely ignored.
- The "SELECT *" message is log-related and is just a delay issue between bootup time and the execution of that specific operation.
- Similar stuff is happening with the WUDFRD error. Some PNP drivers are not loading up fast enough and suffer a delay between the system's load up and theirs. If you just see one entry, they likely get recovered soon after, enabling what I assume is a multimedia card reader, judging by the message.

If there's no message related to the GPU, the fault may be somewhere else. Do try with that 280, although something closer to the 6950 would be better...
At best, it'll rule out the GPU.

The PSU is actually the next in line. When you get a power supply you're indeed looking for enough juice to fuel your system, but you need to make sure the power also comes in clean. Having high wattage is essentially useless if voltage or current can spike at random due to its bad constructive quality.
What's the model and manufacturer of that unit?

my PSU is a H750E-01 Dell - 50-60 Hz - 750 Watt.

 

[Vynavill]

Hmm, it's not easy to look for decent reviews about OEM power supplies. It looks to be a fine unit tho, at least from what I've Googled around.

Mind you, to take it out of the equation completely, I would take a shot at a clean GPU driver re-installation. Use Display Driver Uninstaller to remove them tho, and not the default windows utility.
Besides, you'll be needing that anyway if you're really going to test an Nvidia card on a system that previously had an AMD GPU.