[SOLVED] Help My pc keeps crashing when playing games or executing gpu benchmarks/tests

[Luis96]

Hello, I’m starting to feel a bit frustrated with my problem so I decided to get an account in this forum since it helped my quite a lot to understand hardware and see if someone smarter than me can help.

For the path 2 months or so I’ve been unable to play nearly any game since I would get a black screen of death immediately.
This has been happening for a couple of years, I tried fixing it a couple of times but since it happened quite sporadically I didn't put much effort into it.

But recently it got unbearable, so I started looking what it could be, and it seemed the most probable thing was the psu, it was a 850W but I read reviews of it and many people complained that it degraded very quickly, so I bought a 650w 80 plus bronze one https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/B07HDMCXJV/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 since at the moment I was pretty sure it was the problem but it keeps happening.

I also tested my ram and cpu, I found the cpu was overheating a lot, it was around 90 degrees without doing anything specially demanding but I changed the cooler and thermal paste and now it is in normal levels, 30 to 50.
Finally, I uninstalled the drivers with DDU and reinstalled them again but nothing.

I've tested the ram with windows memory diagnostic, and I’ve been running benchmarks with performanceTesting, furMark and cpu-z and everything is around average and only crashes when trying to test the gpu, but from what I've read if the gpu is faulty it shouldn't appear black screen of death but instead weird things would start to appear on screen and everything would slow down.

Here are my pc specs:

psu: mars gaming 650 80 plus bronze
cpu: i7-4470
gpu: GTX 970
ram: 8gb DDR3 X 2
motherboard: ASRock H97M Pro4

Everything is around 6 years and a half old except for the psu which is brand new

I have windows 10 education and it's fully updated.
Another thing, I don’t know if it’s important but after a couple of minutes of the crash the pc restarts on its own and works perfectly.

Is the graphic card really wrong/faulty and I have to pray to the gods that GPUs start being accessible soon? Or is there another issue?


I hope my English was not unbearable, and thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

 

[Archaic59]

Your Mars power supply is junk. You can NOT get a good quality 650 watt power supply for 39,95 €. Good models cost twice that much or more. There are NO qualified reviews of their models which is a huge red flag. You made a bad choice. There may be some other problem with your system but the power supply is just junk.

 

[Luis96]

Your Mars power supply is junk. You can NOT get a good quality 650 watt power supply for 39,95 €. Good models cost twice that much or more. There are NO qualified reviews of their models which is a huge red flag. You made a bad choice. There may be some other problem with your system but the power supply is just junk.

Goddamit really? the reviews seemed good and it says it has 80 plus bronze, doesn't that mean that it will give at least 82% of it's stated power suply? I used an online power calculator and said that my pc would use around 400w si I though this was good enough ...

So I get that they lied and it gives much less than it's 650w right? Any recomendations on a good psu? What should I look for to choose a good one by myself? I already bought a bad one and if I go by the price I fear I might choos badly again and buy a overly priced psu junk ...

Thanks for the answer btw, even if it means I threw away 40 euros I know it's my fault

Edit: Is there any way we can discard the gpu being faulty without changing the psu though? I would feel even dumber if I changed it again only for it to not work.

 

[Archaic59]

Goddamit really? the reviews seemed good and it says it has 80 plus bronze, doesn't that mean that it will give at least 82% of it's stated power suply? I used an online power calculator and said that my pc would use around 400w si I though this was good enough ...

So I get that they lied and it gives much less than it's 650w right? Any recomendations on a good psu? What should I look for to choose a good one by myself? I already bought a bad one and if I go by the price I fear I might choos badly again and buy a overly priced psu junk ...

Thanks for the answer btw, even if it means I threw away 40 euros I know it's my fault

Edit: Is there any way we can discard the gpu being faulty without changing the psu though? I would feel even dumber if I changed it again only for it to not work.

You can't go by amazon reviews. Most people don't know what makes a good power supply. You need to seek reviews from websites that do complete teardowns with component analysis to determine if the parts they used are any good and then torture testing to see if it can deliver what it claims without failing. Companies that make junk power supplies do not send models out to be reviewed by qualified people...for a good reason.

"Is there any way we can discard the gpu being faulty without changing the psu though?"

Not really unless you can test the GPU in another system. In the long run you need to change the PSU regardless. I'd use one of your known working power supplies and try to sort out the issue before buying another one. Have you tried running on iGPU (integrated graphics) to see if the system runs stable? Remove the GPU and plug the monitor to a motherboard port. If it still has issues with iGPU then the problem may not be PSU or dedicated GPU related. If it runs ok then I'd try to test the GPU in another system. If that works ok the most likely problem is PSU. Perhaps some others here can help more and give more suggestions than me. There's an outside chance the motherboard is bad but I'd try other things first. Be sure the monitor supports the resolution and refresh rate you're trying to use.

 

[Afro_ninja199]

Goddamit really? the reviews seemed good and it says it has 80 plus bronze, doesn't that mean that it will give at least 82% of it's stated power suply? I used an online power calculator and said that my pc would use around 400w si I though this was good enough ...

So I get that they lied and it gives much less than it's 650w right? Any recomendations on a good psu? What should I look for to choose a good one by myself? I already bought a bad one and if I go by the price I fear I might choos badly again and buy a overly priced psu junk ...

Thanks for the answer btw, even if it means I threw away 40 euros I know it's my fault

Edit: Is there any way we can discard the gpu being faulty without changing the psu though? I would feel even dumber if I changed it again only for it to not work.

is the gpu over clocked? are you using msi afterburner?

 

[Luis96]

is the gpu over clocked? are you using msi afterburner?

No I'm not

 

[Afro_ninja199]

No I'm not

download msi afterburner and underclock ya GPU by -60 and see what happens

 

[Luis96]

download msi afterburner and underclock ya GPU by -60 and see what happens

Thank you very much for the tip, it indeed worked, I could run 3D tests and play thrones of brittania fluidly. One thing though, the gpu reached 70 degrees even though I reduced by around 60% it's core clock, should that happenl? maybe the problem was that the gpu is overheating?

 

[Afro_ninja199]

Thank you very much for the tip, it indeed worked, I could run 3D tests and play thrones of brittania fluidly. One thing though, the gpu reached 70 degrees even though I reduced by around 60% it's core clock, should that happenl? maybe the problem was that the gpu is overheating?

did you do -60 or 60%

 

[Luis96]

did you do -60 or 60%

With -60 it still crashes immediatly, I reduced it by -300 wich is about 60% of what I can reduce in total. I've tried with -200 and it still works but with -120 it crashes again but it lasts a couple of seconds and from what I could see it didn't overheat. so I guess the psu is at fault and the higher the clock speed the more energy it draws from the psu right?

 

[Luis96]

With -60 it still crashes immediatly, I reduced it by -300 wich is about 60% of what I can reduce in total. I've tried with -200 and it still works but with -120 it crashes again but it lasts a couple of seconds and from what I could see it didn't overheat. so I guess the psu is at fault and the higher the clock speed the more energy it draws from the psu right?

okay I think I finally know what is happening, in the end it seems it wasn't a psu related problem. Thanks to your underclocking suggestion I was able to finall run some tests without screen going black immediatly. It turns out that my gpu crashes when running direct x tests, with 9 and 10 it needs less underclock and with 11 and 12 it needs more underclock but needs underclock anyway. I don't know if this can be fixed, maybe my card simply got degraded, it has nearly 7 years after all.

I got an even newer 750w psu, wich I don't know if I'll keep since probably the old one was still working properly, so I can say for sure it's not psu related.
Anyway thanks for your reply, I didn't even know underclock could be done since I never even did overclock. If you know a way to solve this it would be perfect, if not I guess I'll go with an underclocked gpu for while.

 

[hotaru.hino]

okay I think I finally know what is happening, in the end it seems it wasn't a psu related problem. Thanks to your underclocking suggestion I was able to finall run some tests without screen going black immediatly. It turns out that my gpu crashes when running direct x tests, with 9 and 10 it needs less underclock and with 11 and 12 it needs more underclock but needs underclock anyway. I don't know if this can be fixed, maybe my card simply got degraded, it has nearly 7 years after all.

I got an even newer 750w psu, wich I don't know if I'll keep since probably the old one was still working properly, so I can say for sure it's not psu related.
Anyway thanks for your reply, I didn't even know underclock could be done since I never even did overclock. If you know a way to solve this it would be perfect, if not I guess I'll go with an underclocked gpu for while.

I'm probably in the minority, but if all you got is that and you try to work out the limitations of what it can and can't do and be mindful of those limitations, I don't see a reason to immediately chuck it out the window. I've had a few machines with PSUs that even in their time people would scoff at if given a serious examination. It's like people may scoff at buying a dirt cheap car, but as long as you don't try to race with it and keep up with maintenance, it's probably going to last you longer than certain luxury brands.

Now I'm not saying you should always cut corners like this when shopping for parts, but I'm not an advocate of "I think it sucks, so you should immediately stop using it and throw it away"

 

[Afro_ninja199]

okay I think I finally know what is happening, in the end it seems it wasn't a psu related problem. Thanks to your underclocking suggestion I was able to finall run some tests without screen going black immediatly. It turns out that my gpu crashes when running direct x tests, with 9 and 10 it needs less underclock and with 11 and 12 it needs more underclock but needs underclock anyway. I don't know if this can be fixed, maybe my card simply got degraded, it has nearly 7 years after all.

I got an even newer 750w psu, wich I don't know if I'll keep since probably the old one was still working properly, so I can say for sure it's not psu related.
Anyway thanks for your reply, I didn't even know underclock could be done since I never even did overclock. If you know a way to solve this it would be perfect, if not I guess I'll go with an underclocked gpu for while.

only reason i new to underclock was when i brought my 1080ti 2nd hand it'd crash, i underclocked it by -40 and haven't had any issues since