HELP! Weird stability issues

chabsan

Commendable
May 21, 2016
4
0
1,510
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.


 
Solution
yes, the power supply has a circuit going to the motherboard and it sends a signal Power_ok signal to the motherboard circuit.
when too much power is drawn from a motheboard slot, the PSU or the motherboard may detect the problem and reset the CPU. The better the motherboard the more likely to have the protection circuits, same goes for the power supply.

You can get various cases where motherboard detects a power problem on a PCI/e bus (gpu) resets the CPU and does not wait and immediately lets the cpu start processing again. Then the CPU starts up before the power supply has recovered from the power problem and you get another power protection circuit going off. End result is you have to do two restarts.
I think I also recall...
I would update the motherboard high definition audio drivers, remove any overclocking software, boot into BIOS and update the BIOS version or reset it to defaults so that it rescans the hardware. Boot into windows and see if you still have the same problem.

Oh, and make sure your GPU is in the slot that is closest to the the CPU on the motherboard. Also, make sure the GPU is getting proper power thru its external power connectors.

if you do not use the GPU sound support via a video cable to speakers in the monitor, turn off the GPU sound in windows control panel device manager.
 


I updated the BIOS and drivers and it still crashes. The weird thing is that when I swap out the GTX 670 for a GTX 960 everything works fine and is very stable. The GTX 670 still works fine in my brothers system.

The problem I have now is do I buy a new PSU or should I buy a new GPU?

Any way of testing the PSU?
 
There's another weird thing that I just noticed. I often have to reset the computer twice before I can successfully log into windows after a crash or freeze.

I am really confused by all of this. Can a PSU really be the cause of all this?
 
yes, the power supply has a circuit going to the motherboard and it sends a signal Power_ok signal to the motherboard circuit.
when too much power is drawn from a motheboard slot, the PSU or the motherboard may detect the problem and reset the CPU. The better the motherboard the more likely to have the protection circuits, same goes for the power supply.

You can get various cases where motherboard detects a power problem on a PCI/e bus (gpu) resets the CPU and does not wait and immediately lets the cpu start processing again. Then the CPU starts up before the power supply has recovered from the power problem and you get another power protection circuit going off. End result is you have to do two restarts.
I think I also recall having BIOS bugs that would require two resets to get the system going again.






 
Solution