Question Help to diagnose system crashes / Possibly related with GPU hardware or drivesrs.

[SalvaPC]

Hello, I started to have sudden system crashes when I'm running games and some other applications that I've been using just perfectly till two days ago, I'll try to summarize what I did so far:

The most recent change I did in my system was a graphic drivers update so I've been trying to reinstall, clean uninstall and downgrade these but the problem persists.

I've been testing if RAM memory sticks were the problem but changing them neither stopped the system crash.

Scanned the PC with tdsskiller in safe mode but nothing was found except a "potential thread" from one of Adobe functions named Switchboard.exe that is something I had installed since ever.

A week ago I decided to uninstall Avast free antivirus and started running ESET in trial mode which seemed to work well and got me pleased with its functions, and all my habitual activities weren't giving me any problems before I tried to update my video drivers so I have my doubts that the AV might be the problem.

Since I have a dedicated hard drive where I install games I tried running a game from the system hard drive which is the newest one I have but the crash still happen.

I'm still going to run a scan disk and a full virus scan although I highly doubt there might be any problem, although there are some chances that I have a failure in my O.S. or the hard drive itself, but in the meanwhile I'd like to ask what other diagnostic tools you could recommend me to see if there is a hardware failure in my GPU or if there's something stronger than the default drivers installer to see if I can clean the recent installations I mentioned in this post.

Also let me know if this post and its format is correct for its purpose and thanks in advance for any help.

PS: Right when I pressed the "preview" button before posting this my PC crashed again, gladly the post was auto-saved when I returned and tried the preview button again without problems this time. Thanks again.

 

[dotas1]

List your full system specs please. When you say "crash" what does exactly happen?

 

[SalvaPC]

The exact behavior is the following, I can launch a game, some times it even loads the scenario/world, some others the issue is before it finishes loading, but every time it stops showing anything at all, not even a BSOD and keyboard caps lock is not responding and there's no hard drive activity.

When I restart the computer I can tell it initializes the OS because I see the HDD activity and the keyboard caps lock and scroll lock buttons are responding, also the keyboard is retroiluminated so I can see it turning on and off as it usually does when the computer is loading the OS.

Only solution is to unplug the computer for a few seconds and just then I can restart the system normally, also the motherboard has this red light for auto-mem config that is turned on if memory is failing, but this is not the case.

Yet there are chances that the motherboard might be failing since it is quite old and I already had problems with the ram sockets which works fine now but still gives some problems sporadically.

PSU is an NZXT Hale82 at 550w by the way.


Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
AMD Phenom II X4 965 33 °C
Deneb 45nm Tech
RAM
8,00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 1333MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK Computer INC. M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 (AM3) 33 °C
Graphics
SyncMaster (1920x1080@59Hz)
3072MBATI AMD Radeon R9 200 Series (Sapphire/PCPartner) 32 °C
Storage
931GB Western Digital WDC WD10EZEX-08WN4A0 ATA Device (SATA) 27 °C
465GB Western Digital WDC WD5000AAKX-00ERMA0 ATA Device (SATA) 28 °C
931GB Western Digital WD Elements 10B8 USB Device (USB (SATA)) 32 °C



Generado con Speccy v1.26.698

 

[SalvaPC]

After a whole day doing different attempts to find the issue the system just started working again, my guessing is that what might be failing is the motherboard because when I upgraded the PSU to its current NZXT Hale82 it was because the previous PSU I had ended up with a burnt capacitor, I assume since the motherboard got exposed to such malfunction and among the long time I've been using it, the power stage in the circuit might be failing now.

Only way to confirm my guessing is with proper motherboard routine testing hardware which I don't have, but I tested the GPU card on another computer and had no failures, also is not the first time this computer presents some problems that later after turning the whole power off or even disarming every piece of hardware and rebuilding it again starts working again. I did a visual inspection and there are no signs of burned circuits or capacitors nor anything else and neither is anything such like these in the interior of the PSU.

I'm adding this reply in order to let anyone who reads this know what was the possible cause of such system crashes where the computer just turns off or gets freeze or black screen, etc...

I think that since my system now seems to be working as usual I'd request to consider this thread as solved unless there are any other suggestions or software tools to recommend me to find you if any of these possible causes can be confirmed.

Regards.