PC Crashing While Gaming

[planeace222]

Recently, I bought Elite Dangerous, and downloaded Fortnite, but have had issues running them. Here is my part list:

Pentium G4560 @3.5Ghz
8GB 2400Mhz DDR4 Kingston Fury X
ASUS AMD RX 480 4GB GDDR5
ASUS LGA 1151 270-K Motherboard
EVGA SuperNova 650W
250GB Samsung Evo 850 SSD
1TB WD Blue HDD

I must say, there is a bit of dust on the fans of my case, but minimal on the components. However, I don't think thermals were a problem. What I have noticed is a lot of RAM usage. Upon startup, even with some apps disabled on startup, I still see between 25-40% RAM usage, and with games, it's around 70-80% or maybe more. As far as I know, all my drivers are up to date, and the PC is about 11 months old since I built it.

As for gaming, I can run CSGO without a hitch, but when trying to run Fortnite, even on medium and low settings (game defaults to maximum), the load screens and my PC freeze, and the one time I got into a game, I played for 2 minutes before I got errors which I couldn't view except one that said that I didn't have enough VRAM which doesn't make sense because my GPU was only 50% used. Elite Dangerous ran smoothly while doing offline training, but when I tried to go into either solo or open play, the game freezes and crashes. I can only view my ship in the station for 10 seconds before it crashes. I bought another 4GB stick to put ram at 12GB (yes, I do give up dual channel, but that shouldn't affect gaming) to see if it's a ram issue, and I will clean my PC soon when I put ran in and then a thorough cleaning when I get an i7 7700k. Any suggestions? Do I need to reinstall Windows?

I never have seen these problems only until maybe November and when I bought and downloaded the two new games. My internet is very quick with speeds with 10-50 Ms ping, and I use Wifi since it is strong and I can get it without running a long Ethernet cable.

Thanks.

 

[geofelt]

Game crashes for particular games may well be because of the need for a game patch.

Next, if a game crashes after a while, the reason may be high temperatures.

If your cooler is functioning properly, I expect to see 10-15c. over ambient at idle.

What is your case and fan arrangement?
Any cooler(cpu or gpu) needs fresh air to do its job.
The G4560 is not a hot processor, but your RX480 is a hot card.

12gb should be sufficient ram.
Windows will keep unused code in ram in anticipation of reuse; it dows not necessarily mean that is what is actually in use.
A real shortage of ram will show up in the hard page fault statistics in the windows performance monitor.
More that 1 per second indicated the need for more ram.

Run memtest to verify that all your ram is OK.
You should complete a full pass with NO errors.
And... the matching 4gb on each channel will be running in dual channel mode; the odd 4gb will be single channel.
More ram is better, regardless.

Do not worry about vram unless you are modifying a game yourself.

VRAM has become a marketing issue.
My understanding is that vram is more of a performance issue than a functional issue.
A game needs to have most of the data in vram that it uses most of the time.
Somewhat like real ram.
If a game needs something not in vram, it needs to get it across the pcie boundary
hopefully from real ram and hopefully not from a hard drive.
It is not informative to know to what level the available vram is filled.
Possibly much of what is there is not needed.
What is not known is the rate of vram exchange.
Vram is managed by the Graphics card driver, and by the game. There may be differences in effectiveness between amd and nvidia cards.
And differences between games.
Here is an older performance test comparing 2gb with 4gb vram.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Performance-2GB-vs-4GB-Memory-154/
Spoiler... not a significant difference.
A more current set of tests shows the same results:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1114-vram-comparison-test/page5.html

And... no game maker wants to limit their market by
requiring huge amounts of vram. The vram you see will be appropriate to the particular card.

 

[planeace222]

Game crashes for particular games may well be because of the need for a game patch.

Next, if a game crashes after a while, the reason may be high temperatures.

If your cooler is functioning properly, I expect to see 10-15c. over ambient at idle.

What is your case and fan arrangement?
Any cooler(cpu or gpu) needs fresh air to do its job.
The G4560 is not a hot processor, but your RX480 is a hot card.

12gb should be sufficient ram.
Windows will keep unused code in ram in anticipation of reuse; it dows not necessarily mean that is what is actually in use.
A real shortage of ram will show up in the hard page fault statistics in the windows performance monitor.
More that 1 per second indicated the need for more ram.

Run memtest to verify that all your ram is OK.
You should complete a full pass with NO errors.
And... the matching 4gb on each channel will be running in dual channel mode; the odd 4gb will be single channel.
More ram is better, regardless.

Do not worry about vram unless you are modifying a game yourself.

VRAM has become a marketing issue.
My understanding is that vram is more of a performance issue than a functional issue.
A game needs to have most of the data in vram that it uses most of the time.
Somewhat like real ram.
If a game needs something not in vram, it needs to get it across the pcie boundary
hopefully from real ram and hopefully not from a hard drive.
It is not informative to know to what level the available vram is filled.
Possibly much of what is there is not needed.
What is not known is the rate of vram exchange.
Vram is managed by the Graphics card driver, and by the game. There may be differences in effectiveness between amd and nvidia cards.
And differences between games.
Here is an older performance test comparing 2gb with 4gb vram.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Performance-2GB-vs-4GB-Memory-154/
Spoiler... not a significant difference.
A more current set of tests shows the same results:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1114-vram-comparison-test/page5.html

And... no game maker wants to limit their market by
requiring huge amounts of vram. The vram you see will be appropriate to the particular card.

Thank for your reply. I have a cooler master hab xb Evo (horizontal, two level lan box) with two fans pulling in, and one 120mm and 200mm fans pushing out. How do you run memtest? Is it through CMD prompt?

 

[geofelt]

memtest is a downloadable program.
It boots from a usb, cd, or even a floppy.
https://www.memtest86.com/download.htm