Instant shutdown while gaming - PSU related?

[Loial]

Hi everyone,

I've been experiencing more and more frequent instant shutdowns while playing games on my PC (Smite, for instance). It can happen after 30 minutes of playing, or it can happen while watching the login screen for less than 2 minutes. Recently, these shutdowns have been happening closer to the 2 min mark than before. Please note that this isn't happening when I'm not actually running the game on one of my two screens (if it's in the background, I don't experience these).

I've read up a bit on the internet, and it seems it might be PSU related, so I'm asking for your input/advice on this? The PSU itself isn't old, about 13 months. I've also confirmed that it's not because of high temperatures, because I've ran GPU/FPU/Memory stress tests on my machine for 30 minutes and nothing went wrong at all.

Here's my build:
OS: Windows 7 Pro, SP 1
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P
CPU: QuadCore AMD Athlon II X4 640, 3000 MHz (15 x 200)
Power Supply: Corsair TX-850W
Memory: 8GB (2x 4 GB DDR3-1333 Corsair Vengeance CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
HDs: 1x 240GB SSD Crucial CT240M500SSD1, 1x 1TB Western Digital WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0
Network: D-Link DWA-130 Wireless N USB Adapter
Case: Cooler Master HAF 922

Even after enabling crash dumps, none are created so I can't analyze why the computer's shutting down (I only have access to small memory dump(256k) or kernel memory dump. Right now the 256k ones are enabled).

Does anyone have thoughts / pointers on this? Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

 

[vagrantsoul]

did this happen after updating to the latest drivers for the video card? i've now had 5 friends call me about this and that has been a common theme among them all... try rolling drivers back if you recently updated them.

 

[Kevin Stuart]

Sounds like you've narrowed it down pretty well. You don't have some cheapo GPU you can put in there to make sure it's not some issue related to that driver? Like an ATI junker low-end something? I know it's a pain to do, but it'd definitely rule out a driver issue.

Other games are fine? You say windowed, but not the active window, it never happens?

 

[Loial]

Thanks for the replies guys! I'll definitely try rolling back to a previous video driver, but this has been happening for quite a while now, I'm not sure if I've only seen one new driver since the first shutdown happened.....it's worth investigating!

As far as the game running minimized I've never seen it crash, and I haven't ran it in windowed mode -- I'll give it a try. Other games have been causing shutdown on and off for a while now, but since I don't play a lot of "graphic intensive" games (Smite isn't all that intensive, it's just that when you compare it to Hearthstone, well....yep), I don't have a lot of titles to compare.

 

[Loial]

Any thoughts as to why my computer is not generating any crash dumps though? That would help me see if it's a video driver issue or not, but my C\Windows\Minidump folder stays empty.

 

[vagrantsoul]

from MSFT:
There are several reasons why the Memory.dmp file is not being created when your computer encounters a STOP message:

The Memory.dmp file already exists and the option Overwrite Any Existing File (found in Control Panel System) is not selected. It is a good idea to leave this box checked and to move or copy the current Memory.dmp file.


if this has been happening for a while, you COULD have a dodgy PSU (dying) or video card... seeing if i can find anything out
The paging file on the boot drive is not large enough. To use the "Write Debugging Information To" feature to obtain a complete memory dump file, the paging file on the boot drive must be at least as large as physical memory + 1 MB. When you create a kernel memory dump file, the file is usually around one-third the size of the physical memory on the system. Of course, this quantity will vary, depending on your circumstances.
The paging file is not on the %systemroot% partition. When the STOP error occurs, the system crash dump is written out to the pagefile on the root of the %systemroot% drive.
There is not room for the Memory.dmp file in the path specified in Control Panel for writing the memory dump.
It is possible that the SCSI controller is bad or the system crash is caused by a bad SCSI controller board.
If you specify a non-existent path, a dump file will not be written. For example, if you specify the path as C:\Dumpfiles\Memory.dmp and no C:\Dumpfiles folder exists, a dump file will not be written.

Note The administrator can configure the computer to generate system event log and to send alerts to specific computers or users upon a system crash. This is a very useful feature of Windows for monitoring systems for system crashes when away from computers and when system configured for automatic reboot.

 

[alpha27]

me thinks a the 750 ti cant handle 2 monitors when gameing, psu is powerful enuff to run higher end gfx, but random crash at loggin sounds suss maybe drivers!

 

[Loial]

@vagrantsoul: All my dump options seemed to be good. I've manually added the complete dump directory path just to be safe, I'll advise after the next crash if it did create a file or not.

@alpha27: I've been running a dual monitor setup for almost 10 years now, and with card that have a lot less performance than the 750ti, so I don't think that's the issue?

Also it might be of note that my +12V on the PSU dips as low as 11.664 and averages maybe around 11.800~. While the 11.800 is not so bad, I fear that the 11.664 might be the dips that cause the crashes?

 

[Loial]

Unfortunately, even manually adding the path to dump the file in didn't create one.

This time the shutdown happened after doing the following steps:

1- Fresh boot of Windows
2- Start the game, run it in the background for ~30 minutes while browsing the internet with Chrome
3- Switch back to the game window
4- Computer shutdown within 1-2 seconds.