Question My PC keeps dying when gaming and we can't figure out why.

malyn24

Reputable
Feb 9, 2018
19
0
4,510
Whenever I play a game, about half an hour into the session, my PC will just die. The power shuts completely off and it will boot itself back up.
I took it to the repair place and they couldn't figure out why it was happening. We did get some RAM errors, but they re-tested all 4 sticks in each slot on the Motherboard and there were no more errors found after that one time. So that is probably ruled out.
And yes, all drivers are up to date. This is a brand new PC. All fresh new parts. It was just built last week. I will share the specs in case that matters.

Gigabyte Z590 motherboard.
Intel i7 11700k cpu
MSI Nvidia RTX 3080
32g RAM (4 sticks)

Not sure the other parts matter.

The guys at the shop have ran it for 24 hours and did multiple 4k stress tests and it held up the whole time. So why does it keep on dying a half hour into a session of Destiny 2?

Like I said, everything is brand new. This started happening the day it was built. If it dies from a high intensity of graphics, could it be the GPU? Not sure a GPU would cause the whole system to lose power and reboot itself though. And I'm pretty sure it's not a faulty power supply because the PC doesn't crash when there isn't any gaming happening.
 

Phaaze88

Titan
Ambassador
That's not Gold, and it looks like there's no reviews available either - though it hasn't even been a year since it launched.
[The Cultist's tier list has it at B Tier(speculative), so that doesn't really mean anything until an actual review is out.]


We did get some RAM errors, but they re-tested all 4 sticks in each slot on the Motherboard and there were no more errors found after that one time. So that is probably ruled out.
That sounds like it was checked off rather quickly. What did the technician test with, Windows Memory Diagnostic? That one's not very thorough, compared to others, like Memtest.
Is the kit 4x 8GB? Two, 2x 8GB? The latter adds a factor of instability.


And I'm pretty sure it's not a faulty power supply because the PC doesn't crash when there isn't any gaming happening.
Games are one of the most stressful workloads out there that power supplies have to deal with. Constantly changing(high - low) workloads are harder than high, steady ones.
Most benchmarks lean towards the synthetic side of things and aren't as hard on the psu as actually playing the games.

The gpus do have a feature/mechanism that's supposed to let the user know the psu is a problem. Have you observed LEDs lighting up above the gpu's PCIe sockets when it is in use? To see what I mean, see 25:45 - 26:45 of the following:


The guys at the shop have ran it for 24 hours and did multiple 4k stress tests and it held up the whole time. So why does it keep on dying a half hour into a session of Destiny 2?
Is that consistently around the half hour mark? Usually a symptom of hardware. Software tends to be sporadic. Those 4K stress tests probably don't hit ram in the same manner Destiny 2 does.
I want to suspect that ram - is auto restart on system failure disabled?