My gaming PC shuts down because of Resident Evil. Please help

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nVidea

nVidea

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Aug 11, 2014
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This morning, my gf played resident evil 6. After a few minutes of starting the game, the entire PC shut down. Power supply is shut down, the entire system is down.

I opened it again, and played the Resident evil 6 again, and the PC shuts down again.

I opened the pc again and played Black Ops 1 highest graphics settings, my gf played it and the pc never shut down.

What I'm confused about is that I played Res.Evil 6 a few days ago and I played for 5 minutes before quitting the game (I never liked the game anyway)...

Anyway, I thought the rig is not yet hot enough to produce enough power, so I let my gf play and finish 1 chapter of Black Ops 1 and I told her to play Res Evil 6. After she open that game, my pc shuts down again -.-

must be something wrong with the settings because i kinda changed the video settings, Does it have something to do with the video settings of the game?

My rig specs:

Athlon II x3 450
Asus m5a78m LX
R9 270x Toxic 2gb OC
SEASONIC 620W
Kingston 4GB 1330

What do you think is the problem?

EDIT:

1. That's it this happen again.

I was playing Blacksite Area 51, 720p high settings, no AA. After 5 minutes of gaming, my PC shuts down. But before that, my girlfriend played black ops from middle chapter right up to the end straight. No problem. But when I played Blacksite, just after her, It shut down.


What are the possible solutions?
How can I lock the 4th core of my CPU so that it would be more stable? Does anybody even knows how to safely lock the 4th core?

2. I tried playing Resident Evil 6 again, to lowest graphics settings, but set to 60 FPS. The game managed to survive for a few more minutes of gameplay until my PC shut down.

EDIT

Here's my interior rig: http://imgur.com/gallery/gLKiq/new pls comment if it doesn't work,.
 
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My first guess would have been the PSU but since its a seasonic unit i'll just jump to the next probable cause - vrm overheating.

You have a very bad motherboard with a 3+1 power phase design that barely supports your athlon x3. If you did any overclocking or unlocked the cpu- remove it. If not, you need to make sure you get extra cooling to the cpu vrm area either by getting better case cooling or a top down cpu cooler. The heat from the graphics card is most likely making the vrm temperature worse and thats when the built in protection kicks in shutting down the PC.

CPU thermal protection might also be set too low (60C?) so the shutdown might be initiated by the mobo CPU sensor not the vrm one - in this case you just need to raise the value to 70C (no more)
 
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What's VRM?? VRAM? Isn't it the RAM on the Video card? I unlocked the 4th core, OOOOHH yeah, When I played the Res.Evil 6 last week, i only had 3 core, it plays well. But this week, or 2 days ago, I unlocked the 4th core. This morning we played the Res.Evil 6, and it always shut down since then.

How to lock the 4th core? Because the only way I know is to have a power black out, which will cause the motherboard to reset its settings, which will lock the 4th core again.

Oh well, I was planning to buy MSI H97 Gaming 3 and Intel Core i3 4160 after two months, you think my pc won't shut down like it does now? Intel has better temperature resistance.

Yeah I also noticed that the R9 270x Toxic heats faster than normal when playing ResEvil 6(compared to playing black ops 1).

So your only option for me is to have better cpu cooler?

I don't get this:

"CPU thermal protection might also be set too low (60C?) so the shutdown might be initiated by the mobo CPU sensor not the vrm one - in this case you just need to raise the value to 70C (no more)"

CPU thermal protection can manually be controlled? i don't know how to control it manually. And how to " raise the value to 70C (no more)" I don't know it.
 
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VRM = Voltage Regulator Module. It is the biggest physical component on your motherboard. It regulates voltage, obviously, and sheds heat in doing so. It is typically the hottest component on the motherboard. If you have motherboard/graphics monitor software, you should be able to see this temperature. VRMs are typically designed for max 125C temp, but anything above 100C could cause issues. Doubt it, though.

Games settings should never cause the issues you describe, directly speaking.

What you describe sounds like a PSU problem. Swap it out with a quality one.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-2547993/psu-tier-list.html

In the meantime, if you dial back your game settings, your GPU load will be less, so it will draw less power and your PSU might be able to keep up.
 
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@George Mulligan,

I bought this PSU back in January 2015 because Tomshardware specifies Seasonic as one of the best brands out there.

I have GPU and CPU temp. How can I monitor te motherboard temp?? GPU temp never reaches 75 degrees.. 60-65 i think, while playing Black ops.

 
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Its NOT the PSU! I guarantee it! Core unlocking on a 3+1 power phase mobo is the issue; all you have to do is lock back the 4th core.
Unlocking cores on these athlons makes them draw a hell of a lot of power. If you want to keep your 4th core you'll need a better mobo or VERY good case cooling and cpu cooler.

Seasonic doesn't fail - and believe me i've put enough of them through hell bit mining exceeding temps of over 50C ambient and they didn;t disappoint.
 
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Sorry, my post was poorly worded. Yes, Seasonic is a quality brand, but it could be a bad apple, which is why I suggested a swap out just to be sure- I only suggest this because this is a common cause to random computer freezes/crashes during game play.

You can download and run GPU-Z to view temperatures.

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/
 
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^ what emdea23 said + the fact of the matter is that the 4th core could be faulty - simple as.
Some fully working phenom 4 cores were locked down to 3 cores just to create the tri-core market segment - others are chips that failed testing on the 4th core either due to bad silicon or out of spec voltage requirements.

Its plainly obvious that your core unlock is creating the problem
 
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How do I lock the 4th core? But... I've been playing Bad Company 2 and Black Ops 1 and it doesn't shut down??



ADDITIONAL INFO

4th core my processor has already been unlocked for over 3 years (a few days after I purchased it)! And I've been playing ALL MODERN WARFARES, BF 2 and BF 3 (when I used GT 430 and GTX 650 ti) Prototype 1 and Prototype 2, Command and Conquer Generals, and it never shut down before like this on Res.Evil 6 (but I could play Battlefield 2 bad company and Call of Duty Black Ops 1 right now without the PC shutting down

Is it the game?
 
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haveyou travelled back in time or something ??
 
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Ok let me rephrase my story.

3 years ago when I bought the entire rig (not yet Toxic and Seasonic), I have already unlocked the 4th core (played heavy games like 3 modern warfares and 2 battlefields and never shut down). However, of course, there were some black outs in my place that causes my motherboard to reset its settings, and, therefore, locking the 4th core.

I think last week, my 4th core is locked (so 3-cores), when I played the Resident Evil 6, it plays well and never shut down, I just only played the part 1 up to the moment where the male protagonist was making medicine for the girl (that was 5 mins of gameplay).

This week, I unlocked the 4th core (so 4-cores), and when my gf played Res Evil 6 for like 2 minutes (during story), it shut down repeatedly. we played 2 res evil and it shut down 2 times.

Then I experimented. I let my gf play COD Black ops 1 high graphics settings, just to make sure it wasn't the motherboard, or to make sure it builds enough heat to let the components work properly. So my gf play COD and she played 1 entire chapter (S.O.G.) and the PC never shut down.

After that, I let her open the Res Evil 6, and it shut down during story.

I think it's story that causes my rig to shut down.
 
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That's it this happen again.

I was playing Blacksite Area 51, 720p high settings, no AA. After 5 minutes of gaming, my PC shuts down. But before that, my girlfriend played black ops from middle chapter right up to the end straight. No problem. But when I played Blacksite, just after her, It shut down.


What are the possible solutions?
How can I lock the 4th core of my CPU so that it would be more stable? Does anybody even knows how to safely lock the 4th core?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

2. I tried playing Resident Evil 6 again today, to lowest graphics settings, but set to 60 FPS. The game managed to survive for a few more minutes of gameplay until my PC shut down.
 
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I think there is a break down of communication between you and those who are trying to help you and I am going to try to summarize it as plainly as possible. The computer on which you have been gaming is 3 years old. You have had it running at both 3 and 4 cores during that time, up until this point you have not had any problem with sporadic shut downs. Your processor has been reset at least a few times by power outages, this in and of itself is not good for the board and perhaps has shaved useful life off of the board. Over the last 3 years your VRMs have had to both supply power for 3 and 4 cores, while it was supplying power for 4 cores it was most likely pushed harder than it was built for aging the board. Though I personally undermine the effect that this has, people on Tom's seem to underestimate the power delivery of AMD motherboards.

We are in a transitional period in gaming. Games have up until in the last year or so been primarily dependent on 1 or 2 cores, only higher end titles used the additional 3rd and 4th core. Now coming into 2015 games written for quad cores are becoming the standard. I theorize that your power delivery system (the vrms) are beginning to show their age when your games start to push the 3rd and 4th cores. If memory serves Resident Evil 6 was a demanding game for its time and battelfield and call of duty really only start to push more than two cores during online game play and thus far you have only sited instances of playing the campaign.
 
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run "prime95" (smallfft) for about 10 min and check temperature with "coretemp", also there you will see, if 3cores or 4cores are set.

Do you have any ASUS tools installed?

run furmark to test your not so old 270X
Two 6Pin PCIe Power connectors are plugged into it?

update BIOS of motherboard, if not already 1603.
don´t update in Windows, because of unstable system!

download BIOS, extract it an USB thumb drive, reboot PC,
press <ALT>+<F2> during post to enter EZ Flash
press <TAB> to switch between drives, until the BIOS is found
 
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I entered the Load Default Settings. When I take a look at the CPU config, it's still X4 B50, not X3.
 
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I'm downloading the Prime95.
For AMD Athlon II X4 B50 (I see four frequencies, Freq 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 all at 800mhz at idle) what's the baseline or safe point of temperature for this cpu?

I'll download the BIOS update later, don't have USB drive.

EDIT:
I run the Prime 95, clicked ok, ok and ok, (didn't change any settings after I downloaded it) all 4 cores at 3200mhz, but after like 45 seconds of testing, my PC suddenly shut down :fou: however, it went back to life again after like 5 seconds, it turned itself on (didn't press any ON button on my case)
 
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yeah i checked the coretemp, it's misleading. The Min and Max temp are both at 0, even though all 4 cores were at 3200mhz.
 
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Temp sensor on the CPU doesn't work if you unlocked cores.

"clear cmos by jumper (described in the manual of the motherboard)" <- this

after clearing CMOS by jumper enter bios and without changing anything save and exit. Your cpu should be back to default after another restart.
 
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Thanks guys, I've managed to set to default settings of BIOS (no software, no update used, just simple click of BIOS and Default Set)
My cores are back to X3 (from X4)
I managed to finish the Prologue chapter of Res Evil without the PC shutting down :)
Here are my screenshots of Core Temp while PLaying res evil 6:
https://imgur.com/a/iHwKl
Alternative:
jubhc0.jpg

15pieiu.jpg

2ekomj6.jpg

2lwof41.jpg
Concluding Questions:
1. Is my temperature normal in gaming point of view?
2. What's TJ Max?
3. Is the Lithography 45nm is also like 32nm and 28nm of Qualcomm cpus (Analogy) ? the smaller nm, the lower cpu consumption, the better?
 
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Tj is Temperature at junction. If the maximum temperature arrives 83°C, it will automatically throttle the CPU cores or shutdown the system

lithography is the technology how the cpu was built, the distance and size of the transistors in a CPU. Smaller lithography means more transistors, means more calculating core power and mostly less power consumption-> less heat =better
nm= nano meter

temperature looks fine, but could be better. new thermal paste between cooler and CPU could help, which CPU cooler is it?
 
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I would like to recommend that you go with an Asus or Gigabyte board, MSI has routinely had the highest number of RMAs and ASrock second highest. Gigabyte and Asus also have their share of problems of course, but are both excellent manufacturers with low RMA numbers. As long as you have made this computer work I think an H81 board and an i5-4460 would be perfect for you. H97 boards are awesome, but really you don't need it.
 
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