I just built my first pc and everything was going great for the first day or so but now it has become a P.I.T.A.! It is very unstable and crashes at the worst times. I have been searching online for solutions for the past week but it has come to this. I need help figuring this one out.
System:
i7 6700k
Asus Z170-A
Hyper 212 EVO
16 GB Kingston HyperX Fury
Kingston V300 120GB SSD (as boot drive)
Seagate 2TB HDD
EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 650W PSU
GeForce GTX 670
Windows 10 (64-bit)
Now I built this computer mainly to use photoshop, after effects, etc. The first time it crashed I was downloading my software while using youtube for music streaming. The screen and audio got very laggy and choppy to the point of freezing before turning into a white screen and restarting itself. Got a "could not start properly" error then Windows attempted an automatic repair but failed.
I thought I might have somehow corrupted the registry so I reinstalled Windows but it has started crashing again. Now here is...
The weird part:
Windows seems to be fine. The GPU driver is updated. The hard drives seem to be working fine.
It seems to only crash when the GPU is under heavy load. However most times times there is no BSOD just a frozen screen (sometimes with artifacts) followed by an automatic system restart. Upon restart sometimes the GPU driver uninstalls itself and sometimes I get the "windows could not start properly" blue screen.
I was only able to get a BSOD once and it gave me a "Video_Scheduler_Internal_Error." Ive been leaning towards the GPU or its driver as the problem so thats where I have been doing most of my troubleshooting. The GPU was given to me by my brother when he upgraded his card. It is a little old but it still worked and was free. I tried using the heaven benchmark to test the GPU but it crashes within the first 30 seconds even on the most basic settings. So I have been using it as a "force crash" tool every time I make adjustments to try and fix this. As a last resort I installed my brothers GeForce GTX 960 to test and surprisingly it seemed to work without any problems. Even the heaven benchmark on the most extreme settings could not crash the system.
"Ah ha! I must just have a faulty graphics card!" I thought. Just to be sure we reinstalled the GTX 670 back on my brothers computer but it worked perfectly fine.
Could this just some kind of compatibility issue and a new GPU will solve everything? PSU issue? I would like to know for sure before buying a new one.
Any tests to help me find out why my computer is so unstable?
Update:
Used AIDA64 to stress test the CPU and memory and had no problems. Very stable. Next I ran the test again on the CPU and GPU and with no surprise it crashed the system within 20 seconds or so.
I also decided to test just the GPU by itself and got some interesting results. 16 seconds into the test the screen started freezing and doing its usual pre-failure thing but I managed to stop the test right before it could crash and everything started working normally again. I decided to run the test again until it would crash. Once it crashed and did the automatic restart I got a BSOD right before I could log back into windows. This time is was a "VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE". I checked the crash dump data and all the BSOD that I've been getting have been caused by "nvlddmkm.sys". I have been using the newest driver updates from the Nvidia website and everything seems to work fine until the GPU has to do some work.
System:
i7 6700k
Asus Z170-A
Hyper 212 EVO
16 GB Kingston HyperX Fury
Kingston V300 120GB SSD (as boot drive)
Seagate 2TB HDD
EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 650W PSU
GeForce GTX 670
Windows 10 (64-bit)
Now I built this computer mainly to use photoshop, after effects, etc. The first time it crashed I was downloading my software while using youtube for music streaming. The screen and audio got very laggy and choppy to the point of freezing before turning into a white screen and restarting itself. Got a "could not start properly" error then Windows attempted an automatic repair but failed.
I thought I might have somehow corrupted the registry so I reinstalled Windows but it has started crashing again. Now here is...
The weird part:
Windows seems to be fine. The GPU driver is updated. The hard drives seem to be working fine.
It seems to only crash when the GPU is under heavy load. However most times times there is no BSOD just a frozen screen (sometimes with artifacts) followed by an automatic system restart. Upon restart sometimes the GPU driver uninstalls itself and sometimes I get the "windows could not start properly" blue screen.
I was only able to get a BSOD once and it gave me a "Video_Scheduler_Internal_Error." Ive been leaning towards the GPU or its driver as the problem so thats where I have been doing most of my troubleshooting. The GPU was given to me by my brother when he upgraded his card. It is a little old but it still worked and was free. I tried using the heaven benchmark to test the GPU but it crashes within the first 30 seconds even on the most basic settings. So I have been using it as a "force crash" tool every time I make adjustments to try and fix this. As a last resort I installed my brothers GeForce GTX 960 to test and surprisingly it seemed to work without any problems. Even the heaven benchmark on the most extreme settings could not crash the system.
"Ah ha! I must just have a faulty graphics card!" I thought. Just to be sure we reinstalled the GTX 670 back on my brothers computer but it worked perfectly fine.
Could this just some kind of compatibility issue and a new GPU will solve everything? PSU issue? I would like to know for sure before buying a new one.
Any tests to help me find out why my computer is so unstable?
Update:
Used AIDA64 to stress test the CPU and memory and had no problems. Very stable. Next I ran the test again on the CPU and GPU and with no surprise it crashed the system within 20 seconds or so.
I also decided to test just the GPU by itself and got some interesting results. 16 seconds into the test the screen started freezing and doing its usual pre-failure thing but I managed to stop the test right before it could crash and everything started working normally again. I decided to run the test again until it would crash. Once it crashed and did the automatic restart I got a BSOD right before I could log back into windows. This time is was a "VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE". I checked the crash dump data and all the BSOD that I've been getting have been caused by "nvlddmkm.sys". I have been using the newest driver updates from the Nvidia website and everything seems to work fine until the GPU has to do some work.