Question Losing my mind - computer hard crashing for no apparent reason ?

[philged]

Been trying to figure out what's going on with this machine for days now and am making no progress.

Have a self built machine put together about a year ago, has been running fine with no problems since then. Basic system info:

Win 10 pro
Gigabyte Z390 Gaming X
i5-9600K
2x8 Corsair DDR4 1333
ADATA SU800 SSD - OS Drive
Intel 512 SSD
Hitachi Deskstar 2tb
Corsair RM550x Gold Modular Power Supply
Corsair 275r Airflow case
Asus R9 380

Everything except the R9 380 is brand new as of a year ago.

About a week ago everything started hard crashing. Working one second, straight to restart the next. The restarts happen in chain cycles. Once everything restarts, it comes back on for 2-3 seconds, then restarts again, over and over until the power supply is turned off or the wall plug is pulled. Once that happens, it can be plugged back in and will restart right away.

Running games and stress tests seems to trigger this, but not always. Sometimes it'll run fine with games and other activities for hours. The most recent incident was. Open League of Legends launcher, hard crash. Run OCCT for 2 minutes, hard crash. Then 3 hours of running fine playing a range of games. 10 hours running on and idle with no issues. Then 30 seconds after sitting down, after that idle time, and doing nothing but moving the mouse and opening folders, hard crash. Some times it just resets while doing nothing.

Because it's a hard crash, there's nothing in any of the windows error reporting logs. There also have been no system or hardware changes other than the auto Windows updates in the last few months before this started happening. Nothing on the system is or has ever been overclocked.

So far I've tried:

• Cleaning out the entire computer, no dust, no fan failures or any direct heat related issues
• Ran Crystal Disk, all disks coming out in the green, no issues, no errors
• Reseated every cable and device in the machine, essentially rebuilt it from scratch, no difference
• Pulled all of the hard drives individually
• Ran on each single stick of RAM
• Ran memtest 86+ with no errors
• Ran virus and trojan scan with no hits
• Reinstalling all of the motherboard, video card, and audio drivers
• Ran OCCT stress tests on CPU, Memory, 3d, VRAM, and Power with hard crashes on all test after 1-4 minutes. Longest test was power at 4 minutes (actually turned the test off and then hard crash 50 seconds later) BUT
• No overheating on any element during every one of those tests, really no temps even above 70c at any time
• No voltage spikes or abnormalities during every one of those test
• No over power issues during the tests
• No current abnormalities during the tests

Any help would be much appreciated, I'm at my wits end trying to figure out what component is causing this.

 

[rgd1101]

test with the gpu out?
with another gpu or psu?

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

I think @rgd1101 is on the right track. Re-starts as you've described them, typically point to an issue with the PSU.

Have you another you could swap out with? Would be quickest way to tell. Your PSU is a rather good one, but it could be failing.

Given it's a year old, you should be able to RMA it. As @rgd1101 has suggested. Testing with and without GPU in, will give you a good idea if it's power related as it shouldn't re-start with iGPU on (but still could).

 

[philged]

Thanks for looking at this and for the suggestions.

I was able to find an OLD card (8800gt) to test in the system.

It seemed like it worked. I was able to run the OCCT CPU and Memory stress tests without issue, which I haven't been able to do. But after trying to run some games, they all failed with the same restart loop, and then the stress tests also failed in the same way as previous.

I don't have another power supply that's compatible with this motherboard, but I was able to pull the power supply and test the voltages with a multimeter. Detached from the computer it seems to work just fine. I'm not seeing any variances with any of the outputs or any other levels that seem to differ from normal. Reviewing the OCCT and Speedfan readings, they're also not showing any issues with voltage, power, or current.

Given how long the computer ran with the 8800 GT before starting to have problems again, I'm thinking that it's similar to an overheating issue, but I'm stumped as to what would be overheating.

Every component in OCCT is showing normal heat levels. Nothing across the board is even approaching high temps let alone max operating temperatures, all the way up to when the system restarts.

Any other thoughts would be greatly appreciated.