[SOLVED] Hard freeze during gaming in new build.

[Rhez]

Hello everyone!

Just yesterday, I got a whole bunch of new components in my pc. Everything seemed to work fine, both Prime95 and Full Load could run for hours with no issues, and it ran for an entire afternoon with me doing occasional work just fine.

But today, I wanted to do some gaming, so I plugged in my controller, and started up Road Redemption. Everything ran smoothly, but after about 30 minutes, sound cut out, my controller stopped responding, and then a few seconds later everything froze. No debug lights on the MBO as far as I could see, no blue screen, had to do a hard reboot. Tried again a few hours later, exactly the same thing.

Any ideas on where to start to figure out what is wrong?


My build is as follows:

CPU: Ryzen 3700X. running in Game Mode with PBO enabled (new)
MBO: MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX. bios from 11-07-2019 (new)
RAM: 2x16 [32GB] GB 3200mhz Patriot running XMP profile (new)
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070
PSU: Corsair VS 650
Storage: Kingston A1000 nVME 248GB as boot drive and SEIKO 480 GB SSD
OS: Windows 10 Home Edition 64bit

Any other info you need, let me know.

 

[Ralston18]

Are you able to monitor system temperatures, etc..? Watch the parameters.

Take a look in Reliability History and Event Viewer for Error codes and warnings.

Reopen the case and doublecheck all cable connections and card seatings. Ensure that everything is fully and firmly in place.

Check Windows Update history. Look for some update that preceded the start of the problem(s).

 

[Rhez]

Are you able to monitor system temperatures, etc..? Watch the parameters.

Take a look in Reliability History and Event Viewer for Error codes and warnings.

Reopen the case and doublecheck all cable connections and card seatings. Ensure that everything is fully and firmly in place.

Check Windows Update history. Look for some update that preceded the start of the problem(s).

Thanks so much for the reply!

Temps get pretty high during the stress tests, but it handled those fine. During Road Redemption, the temps seem to fluctuate between 60-65. Should be more than fine, no?

I took at look at the reliability history and event viewer, and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. It only lists the hard reboots as an unexpected shutdown.

I took a quick look at everything in the case. Everything seems to be in place. Could you think of anything that would not be in place, considering the nature of my crash?

The update thing is a difficult one, since I also reformatted my PC yesterday, so literally every single update came in yesterday.

 

[Ralston18]

Regarding the temperatures. Check the specs and be aware that there is some margin of error in the temperatures being reported. If on the high side then that could be contributing factor.

In the case: did you literally just look or did you actually touch and push? Components such as PCIe cards and RAM can appear to be in place but then reseat with just a minor touch rocking the card into place.

Likewise for cables and jumpers.

The controller is another possible culprit: first try updating the drivers. Second, if possible, try another known working controller on your computer and try the current controller on another computer. Idea being to determine if the problem follows the controller or stays with the computer.

As for the reformatting and updates there is not much to be done about all that. Way too many changes, too fast to identify something that may have gone astray.

May not even show up until there is some certain combination of things (aka "perfect storm") that will cause the problem to re-occur.

So keep an eye on Reliability History and Event Viewer. Check as soon as you can after any hard freezes.
Be aware of what all is running in the background. You may need to remove some apps from startup and gradually add them back (if needed) one by one. Problem could be associated with one or more apps.

 

[Rhez]

Hey everyone! I want to thank you very much for your assistance. It turned out, that my issue was with Bullguard Internet Security. Seems that the "Game Optimization"-feature was doing something screwy to my system.

I discovered it when I was running Furmark, and I noticed that Bullguard Game Optimization recognized it as a game, and started up. That explains why it was the only stress test to actually crash my PC the same as the game did.