Question Every game crashes to desktop without any error messages ?

xavlu

Prominent
Oct 23, 2021
6
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510
Hello, I'm new here so I hope I'm putting this in the right section of the forum.
I'm gonna say in advance that the computer having issues is not mine but of a friend who understands less than me about computer so I'm trying to help out.

We're pretty desperate right now as she had a very old computer from a shop that builds them and since we wanted to play games together, she went to update it to the same shop. So far EVERY game she play ends up crashing to desktop with no error at all at some point. This has been going on for a while now and we've tried as many solution we could find online but we can't really figure this out and we want to try what we can on our own without having to bring the pc back to the shop necessarily for personal reasons.

I'll try to quickly resume every piece of information I have so far and what we've been doing till now.
The pc specs are:
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600Z 6-core
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB
  • MB: Gigabyte B450M S2H V2
  • RAM: 16GB (2 of 8GB each)
  • SSD: 250GB
  • HHD: 550GB
So far this is the games she's been trying to play (every and each one of them crashed at least once, without any error, the games literally just poof):
  • Genshin Impact, runs just fine on medium-high graphic settings, crashes randomly at different time intervals with no real pattern or trigger as far as we know. This is one of the games the pc can run for the most time, it could run for three hours in a row without crashes as well as crashing three times in a row in barely 5 minutes. Someday it would run smoothly without crashes, other day it would keep crashing. Also to note that this one game gives error messages sometimes and other times just crashes to desktop, the error messages can be different and we already looked up on it and tried every fix but doesn't seem like it really did anything.
  • Elsword (the "Free-To-Play" one on steam), crashes once every 5 minutes on high graphic settings, takes about 10 minutes or a bit more on lowest settings. There was a short while after we reformatted the pc that the game ran for more than one hour with no crashes right after the installation of windows, now it got back to the usual crashing.
  • Minecraft, crashed very little times in few hours of play time.
  • The Sims 4, it crashes before she can even finish creating a character.
  • Cyber Hunter, crashes once around every 20-30 minutes (at least once per match).
  • Path of exile, same as cyber hunter.
  • Spiritfarer, like genshin impact, this could run for a hour or few minutes.
  • AdVenture Capitalist, crashes after 20-30 minutes too.
  • Fallout Shelter, same.
  • PC Building Simulator, another one that can run without crashes for a long time, it barely crashes.
  • Missing translation, 20-30 minutes.
  • Our Life: Beginnings & Always, this one crashed just a few times.
So far the only game that hasn't ever crashed was microsoft solitaire... ._.

As another side note, if this can be relevant or of any help, the computer had to be brought back to the store on its first week of life because it would keep crashing (with bsods) constantly. At the time we did some troubleshooting ourselves before bringing the computer back and while performing an hardware scan (I don't remember the exact detail but I believe it was a scan started from the cmd that would make the pc unusable during the whole scan) to the RAM the computer did say there was faulty RAM. My friend told this to the guy and brought the pc back and when he gave it back the pc itself didn't crash anymore, we haven't retried the scan tho and we don't know much of what the problem was and what was done of course.

I had read online that with some of those games (especially Elsword) overclocking might be the issue. We both know very little about it, I basically learned lots of stuff about it while searching for it but we gave it a try and tried disabling any kind of overclock we could find inside the bios but we're not sure we succesfully disabled stuff or everything there was (overclocking was set to "auto" for the ram and doesn't seem like we could find any other kind of overclocking) but it did nothing, the crashes kept going so we brought the settings back to how they were earlier because it also seemed like the pc worked even worse.

We tried very recently to format any hard disk upon finding that the guy who builded the pc left the old hard disk my friend had with the whole windows inside it. Basically the pc had two windows system so we just decided on erasing everything out of the old hard disk after saving up only the stuff we needed and later on we formatted the main SSD and reinstalled windows cleanly. After the windows reinstall we immediately tried running some of the games that used to crash more like Elsword and Cyber Hunter and we managed to play both of them with no crashes at all for a few hours. Althought the next game we tried was Genshin and that one crashed. Since windows was freshly installed I thought that missing updates and updated drivers might have played a part in it so she proceeded onto installing every update from windows update and update her graphic drivers, and we're back at the start.

As for other things we tried, we tried various times to look into windows events viewer (or whatever that's called) for the errors and we didn't find anything useful enough that would help us, we did find some errors but not being able to find anything online didn't help us much. I remember TS4 giving a Unity.dll something error but that's basically it.. We also tried doing a clean boot althought I don't think we ever tried running any game on clean boot, we've kind of lost track of all the stuff we've tried and have to try by now :/
We kept in check computer usage values as one of the first things, but the values are pretty much very very low with any game, they seem just fine.

I can't really remember every exact method we've tried right now but I can say what we haven't tried (which is definitely a shorter list compared to what we have tried, that we could find online that is).

I've read in various places that erasing graphic drivers and reinstalling them cleanly with the help of a DDU (if that's the name, idr) can help but I'm honestly scared of doing that because I did that once on my own pc to solve an issue and I kind of made a mess because my monitor would not catch the frequency or something and I couldn't see anything, I was only able to re install the drivers with the help of a TV, another graphic card and Team Viewer from phone ._. so I'm a bit scared this might happen to her too since she seems to have similar problems with her monitor catching frequencies (if that's even the problem) as mine does. Although I know I could just connect Team Viewer like I did on my pc and help her fix that out if there was the need, I'd leave this as one of the last options... not like I see much choice to be honest tho.

It came to my mind once that maybe a stress test might help us troubleshoot where the problem is, but just as overclocking, stress test is something I'm barely familiar with so I've tried to learn about it as I could and well, now I'm worried that it might damage the computer even more and honestly I don't really want to try my luck so just like the DDU this is the last option we would try if there's really nothing else to do.

I'm not sure if I said anything and I feel like I missed a lot of stuff but I'll eventually update the thread I guess in case I remember something important that I forgot to mention.
We're seriously desperated and I really can't understand what's wrong with the pc and wether it's the pc or the games themselves or something else, all the threads I've found online about identical situations to this were left unsolved or completely not answered and we've tried almost any fix we could find on the few that had some solutions, even the most dumbest fixes you can find on youtube like "set as administator" and "disable fullscreen optimization" on the games, but so far nothing worked.

As a final side note, I want to clarify that I'm 20 and self taught on anything about computers and I'm still pretty ignorant in my opinion so I'm sorry if anything I said might sounds dumb or doesn't make sense but I'm also willing to learn from this kind of experience so please don't be rough with my ignorance, thank you!
 

Vic 40

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The motherboard has the latest bios?

What specific ram is used? If you don't know can you do the next so we know an answer to both questions,

download hwinfo,
install and open it=click run,
close the top window which is the system summary,
in the main window at the left top click "save report",
at the bottom of the next window check "Summary for Clipboard",
after that you'll see what's in the pc,
copy by clicking "copy to clipboard" and rightclick+paste in your next respons
 

xavlu

Prominent
Oct 23, 2021
6
0
510
PSU make, model & approximate age ? (this should always be included in specs list)
The PSU is an I ARENA from chieftec but we don't know exactly the model and my friend can't take it out nor can I help with that since we don't live close.
Is there a way to understand its age? Because I honestly don't know..
Edit: As barely relevant as this might be, we found an email that the guy who built the pc sent my friend before building it where he said he was gonna put a 500W PSU so my guess is that the one she has right now is the 500W model. (The guy later changed every single piece, so the pieces in the email aren't the actual ones but we don't have any email with the actual pieces.)

The motherboard has the latest bios?

What specific ram is used? If you don't know can you do the next so we know an answer to both questions,
  1. Computer: GIGABYTE B450M S2H V2
  2. CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X (Matisse, MTS-B0)
    3800 MHz (38.00x100.0) @ 2644 MHz (26.50x99.8)
  3. Motherboard: GIGABYTE B450M S2H V2
  4. BIOS: F1, 08/28/2020
  5. Chipset: AMD B450 (Low-Power Promontory PROM26.A)
  6. Memory: 16384 MBytes @ 1064 MHz, 15-15-15-36
    - 8192 MB PC24000 DDR4 SDRAM - G.Skill F4-3000C16-8GISB
    - 8192 MB PC24000 DDR4 SDRAM - G.Skill F4-3000C16-8GISB
  7. Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (GP107-400) [NVIDIA]
    NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, 4096 MB GDDR5 SDRAM
  8. Drive: Intenso SSD SATAIII, 250.1 GB, Serial ATA 6Gb/s @ 6Gb/s
  9. Drive: TOSHIBA DT01ACA050, 488.4 GB, Serial ATA 6Gb/s @ 6Gb/s
  10. Sound: NVIDIA GP107 - High Definition Audio Controller
  11. Sound: AMD Family 17h/19h - HD Audio Controller
  12. Network: RealTek Semiconductor RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC
  13. Network: Remote NDIS based Internet Sharing Device
  14. OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Home (x64) Build 19042.1415 (20H2)

Edit: The shop the pc was built at uses used pieces as well, we don't know which one might be used or new tho so..
 
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Vic 40

Titan
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The psu is a piece of crap. Would get something better.

The ram is running below rated specs which can be changed in the bios by enabling XMP.


Would try DDU, but make sure you do it as supposed in safe mode.


Can try a tool called Revo Uninstaller which searches for leftovers too, but again pc should best be in safe mode for best results since the gpu will use the drivers in normal mode. To get into safe mode from settings which is best option.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...-windows-92c27cff-db89-8644-1ce4-b3e5e56fe234
Can use "msconfig" too to get into safe mode. Can start this via search->type msconfig and start it, under the "boottab" can you change how to start, use safe mode+network. Need to undo this one in safe mode to start normal again.

Oh forgot, bios is first bios with which this motherboard was send out, really urge you to update that to,

F62d from 2021-10-13
https://www.gigabyte.com/nl/Motherboard/B450M-S2H-V2-rev-10/support#support-dl-bios

PDF for a how to. Use the tool in the bios for this

Video about updating the bios,

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpxfChQi_gw
 
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xavlu

Prominent
Oct 23, 2021
6
0
510
Hello there,
this reply won't have much important infos sadly as we've both been busy with private life so we had no time to focus on this importants matter.
As of now we're planning to do the DDU and update the bios in the next days hopefully so I'll update about that once we've done all of that.

The psu is a piece of crap. Would get something better.

The ram is running below rated specs which can be changed in the bios by enabling XMP.

We definitely can't change the psu but we will take that into consideration, thank you.
As for the XMP, we enabled it and ram are running at 3000Mhz now but the issue's still there..

I don't know how important this can be but we've been playing The Forest quite a bit and she never happened to crash at all, yesterday we played Onigiri and it crashed for her, as Elsword did, it crashed about every 3-5 minutes on "maximum" settings, around 10 minutes with lowest. Although the game started crashing even more frequently the more we played, as in that if the first two times were 10 minutes long each, it went down to 8 and so on until she would crash as soon as she opened the game.
She's also been playing League of Legends and that's never crashed until now.
And last thing, we tried updating every driver on her pc just to be sure, by using amd and gigabyte's official live updates and stuff.
 

Vic 40

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Hello there,

As of now we're planning to do the DDU and update the bios in the next days hopefully so I'll update about that once we've done all of that.

And last thing, we tried updating every driver on her pc just to be sure, by using amd and gigabyte's official live updates and stuff.
Hope that will help, do let us know.



We definitely can't change the psu but we will take that into consideration, thank you.
Is up to you, can only give advice, think anyway it's really important to upgrade this to something better.
 

xavlu

Prominent
Oct 23, 2021
6
0
510
I'm back with sad news.
We just tried both bios update and DDU, neither worked.
We followed step by step tutorials both for updating bios and the ddu, everything went smooth but games keep crashing just like usual, nothing really changed..
We also tried doing another ram check and this time it said there's no problem with the ram.
We finished just now trying opening game on a clean boot but nothing changes.
We're out of ideas and stuff to try at this point, any suggestion?
 

Vic 40

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xavlu

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Oct 23, 2021
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510
I do come back to the psu, would really like to see that replaced.

Other thing is Toshiba hdd, might be an older one and maybe is faulty, can use the next to do a test,

Our problem we replacing pieces for now is money, this girl spent all her available money for this pc so it would be impossible to buy new pieces as neither of us is financially indipendent, if we have to replace anything we'd want to be sure it's the piece causing the issue, as much as I can get that the psu sucks even if that was the cause we would not be able to replace it now but we would know we would have to replace that at least.

Anyway, we did check the toshiba hard disk (and just to be safe the ssd as well), none of them had problems based on the program, we tried all the tests we had available (self test, short and long general and smart test for the toshiba, just short and long for the ssd) and every result was "pass" (although we did not have that pass info button at the end).
One thing that happened is that when the program starts we get a message saying that a new firmware was detected for the toshiba hdd and there's two links but one doesn't lead to any existing page, the other one seems to lead to a old page that gets redirected into a new page so none of the links works really. I've tried doing a few researches but I didn't even know you could update hard disk's firmwares and I didn't really find anything that could lead me to an update or something.
I don't know if this could change, fix or make anything better tho.


Edit
Hello again, I'm back with some infos that I have no idea if they are useful or related but at this point I'm just gonna try whatever I can.
Today the whole pc crashed while playing genshin and I tried to look on the crash itself to understand if it's related to the game or the game crashes in general.
The error she got is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and we managed to analyze the dump file and I tried looking a bunch of stuff online but I barely got any result considering it's pretty hard for me to understand any of what I found online.
If you think that it can be in any way related or could need any useful info about anything that can fix the game crashes I can upload the bugcheck analiys. (In case I should upload it, is it safe to share the whole file online? I've checked it and done my share of researches to understand if it contains any sensitive informations but I'm not sure myself.)
 
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xavlu

Prominent
Oct 23, 2021
6
0
510
Did your friend do a proper ram test with Memtest86?
MemTest86 - Official Site of the x86 Memory Testing Tool
can first both sticks together see how they fare, but for best result test each stick seperately.
Hello there, sorry for the late reply.
We tested only one of the two sticks for now because it required quite some time and we'll test the other one when we manage to get time for that as well.
With this being said, the one stick we checked had no issue and my friend tried using the pc only with that same ram so without putting the other back in, and the pc would still give the same issue, from this we're quite sure the ram isn't the issue but we're still gonna check the other one in the next few days.

Edit: Forgot to mention that lately the pc has started to crash more and more, the past few days it's been at least 2 crashes per day. The crashes error are usually "kernel security check failure", "page fault in nonpaged area" and "irql not less or equal".
Edit 2: A new crash error spawned, "system service exception".
 
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