Question PC keeps crashing

[UniqueNightingale]

For the past few weeks my PC has been occasionally crashing out of nowhere. At first, this only happened rarely when starting up Deep Rock Galactic, and always within the first 5 minutes of playing the game, so I just assumed it was a bug in the game. After some time, the crashes began occurring more frequently, and outside of playing Deep Rock Galactic as well.
I tried pinpointing the issue by running other games/programs and trying to get it to crash, but I couldn't get my PC to crash consistently for a while, even when maxing out my CPU/GPU/RAM usage. e.g. Sometimes I could run Deep Rock Galactic, Elden Ring, and have multiple Tabs open in Firefox playing videos, all at the same time, and the PC wouldn't crash (although it would obviously slow down to a snail's pace because all my PC's resources were being used), but sometimes the PC would crash while running a single game. So it doesn't seem to be related to resource usage.
By now, the crashes have become extremely frequent, and I don't know what to do any more.

As an example, I've recorded my PC crashing yesterday (crash happens at 3:07):

Here, the screen turns black->grey->black and then you can hear my PC's fan spped up. The PC is completely unresponsive, but still on (The screen will continue showing "no HDMI-Signal detected"). The Crashes are almost always similar to this, just the Color the screen shows varies, and the fan doesn't always go crazy, just sometimes.

Some things I tried to fix the Issue:

Check&Repair/Reinstall every Game/Program where a Crash happened
Updated my GPU drivers
Tested my RAM (using HCI's memtest and Windows' own Memory Diagnosis tool)

My PC isn't new either, it's been running well for the past ~4-6 years I've owned it, and I didn't Download/Install anything new around the time the crashes first started happening.

My Specs:
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700k @4.00 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
HDD: Toshiba DT01ACA 100
Motherboard: ASUS H170M-PLUS
RAM: TeamGroup Elite U-DIMM DDR4 2x8GB

Not sure about the Case, PSU and exact RAM (I just know it's 2x8GB, and I've tried to find out the rest via command prompt), as the PC was bought pre-built. I'll try to find out ASAP though.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice!

 

[white.a.drew]

For the past few weeks my PC has been occasionally crashing out of nowhere. At first, this only happened rarely when starting up Deep Rock Galactic, and always within the first 5 minutes of playing the game, so I just assumed it was a bug in the game. After some time, the crashes began occurring more frequently, and outside of playing Deep Rock Galactic as well.
I tried pinpointing the issue by running other games/programs and trying to get it to crash, but I couldn't get my PC to crash consistently for a while, even when maxing out my CPU/GPU/RAM usage. e.g. Sometimes I could run Deep Rock Galactic, Elden Ring, and have multiple Tabs open in Firefox playing videos, all at the same time, and the PC wouldn't crash (although it would obviously slow down to a snail's pace because all my PC's resources were being used), but sometimes the PC would crash while running a single game. So it doesn't seem to be related to resource usage.
By now, the crashes have become extremely frequent, and I don't know what to do any more.

As an example, I've recorded my PC crashing yesterday (crash happens at 3:07):

Here, the screen turns black->grey->black and then you can hear my PC's fan spped up. The PC is completely unresponsive, but still on (The screen will continue showing "no HDMI-Signal detected"). The Crashes are almost always similar to this, just the Color the screen shows varies, and the fan doesn't always go crazy, just sometimes.

Some things I tried to fix the Issue:


My PC isn't new either, it's been running well for the past ~4-6 years I've owned it, and I didn't Download/Install anything new around the time the crashes first started happening.

My Specs:
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700k @4.00 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
HDD: Toshiba DT01ACA 100
Motherboard: ASUS H170M-PLUS
RAM: TeamGroup Elite U-DIMM DDR4 2x8GB

Not sure about the Case, PSU and exact RAM (I just know it's 2x8GB, and I've tried to find out the rest via command prompt), as the PC was bought pre-built. I'll try to find out ASAP though.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice!

https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/...l_Con_KBL_SZ_W10_64_VER11701057_20190401R.zip

https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc/vga/Intel_Graphics_Accelerator_Driver_win64.zip

https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/lan/Intel_Lan_Win7-81-10_V2023001-2024001.zip

https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc/audio/SCD_Install.zip

 

[DavidM012]

looks pretty straightforward actually the samsung 850 evo has a 5 year warranty or 300tb written you can check the drive health using samsung magician although it may not reveal any useful information it has been known to report flaky drives as healthy since probably in practice S.M.A.R.T info doesn't always say much it can report a drive good that goes out 5 minutes later - I think so because I once bought a cheap ssd that reported all good S.M.A.R.T statistics that spontaneously failed within a matter of hours.

I've also seen a couple of cases with 850's and even 970's reported as healthy drives in samsung magician but displaying similar symptoms so the question is simply, is the 850 SSD the drive on which you have installed your operating system?

If so it's probably a flaky drive so you should get a new drive.

Mobo Manual says you have 1 m.2 slot so you could install an n.v.m.e drive and you will want at least 500gb if you want to use it for steam games - if you have only a 250gb drive you can get fallout 4 on it so then you have a 150gb drive with 100gb free space so you could get the witcher 3 and the halo master chief collection in it - 3 games essentially.

Deep Rock Galactic is quite light on the disk usage though, about 2gb.

Any reason you didn't go for an N.V.M.E drive that's 8x faster than a sata 3 ssd? Have a look on newegg since practically any nvme will be faster and more stable than your 850evo ssd, Could post some links to reviews of the performance drives but you're on PCI-e 3.0 anyway rather than 4.0 and while a pci-e 4 drive would work it wouldn't hit top speed so probably just get an adata xpg or something around the $50-$60 dollar range.

I have an 850 evo that's 7 years old and has 30tbw but I don't use it as the primary operating system drive, it's fine with a steam library on it but both my 850evo and 860evo have occasionally flaked out with no explanation when they were the primary OS drives and I got OS not found when booting and then just by rebooting it loaded normally again. Both drives have been OK for steam libraries though.

So obviously if it's a bit flaky and your primary operating system is on the 850 evo drive any error or glitch is simply going to make it crash. I also bought a new set of sata 3 cables for a tenner which seemed to improve the drives data transfer rate somewhat at least in samsung magician benchmark I get about 500mb/s while windows explorer says something around 3-350mbit/s when copying say, a zipped copy of the windows 10 iso from disk to disk which is about 5gbytes.

All my sata cables were pretty ancient and had been transferred from one build to another in the last 15 years. Not totally sure that they improved any performance but it was about time to get some new ones anyway. Don't think you'd need new sata cables anyway.

So long version, probably just need a new primary os drive and might as well get 500gb for your steam library or you could just as well get 1tb or 2tb if your budget allows for it, whatever you want. The larger drives have more durability too.

 

[UniqueNightingale]

If so it's probably a flaky drive so you should get a new drive.

Thanks for the advice!
Is there any way to make sure the faulty SSD is the problem? Like, migrating my OS to my HDD and checking if the crashes still occur? Or are there any other diagnosis tools?
The reason I'm asking is that I wanna be as sure as possible that a new drive can solve the problem before buying it. With the Christmas + New Year Holidays coming up, buying and refunding (if it doesn't solve the problem) a new hard drive might become a huge timesink.

Any reason you didn't go for an N.V.M.E drive that's 8x faster than a sata 3 ssd?

Honestly, I don't know too much about PCs. This one is pre-built, and I chose it based on the CPU, GPU and RAM. I didn't really look into which hard drive to choose, so maybe that's the reason why I'm in a bit of a pickle now😉

 

[DavidM012]

I suppose you could try installing your OS on to the hdd for diagnostic purposes though I am 99% sure it's the ssd just remove it entirely when you install windows so your two installations don't clash or try to set up dual or multi boot loader or something and give you a headache.

So shut down, remove ssd, and run windows setup on your hdd - as long as you have somewhere to stash any data since it's probably best to wipe the partition during windows setup.

It's totally up to you - could spend a few hours reinstalling windows and all drivers or simply buy the new drive and migrate your OS using disk genius so for that you'll need a couple of usb flash drives one for windows setup and one for disk genius, might need to learn how to use rufus to create bootable usb's from iso's at the moment my removable drives of choice are actually 16 and 32gb micro sd cards because I've got a lexar one that's 150mb/s on usb 3.0 which yields a niftier windows setup speed, with a micro sd to usb 3.0 caddy though these days you can get really fast 400mb/s drives and more on usb too I haven't looked into all that because 150mb is good enough and way better than 5.0mb/s data transfer on usb 2.0.

So yes what you want, either or try it if you aren't sure. So long as the toshiba hdd isn't flaky as well - it may or may not be, should be ok probably.

In any scenario though an nvme is just better anyway.