[SOLVED] PC often crashes, gave Video Memory error, now smells like it's burning

[jozeftierney]

not sure if it's related but I updated a PC from solidworks 2019 to 2020 on friday and it started acting funny, it started randomly freezing, the fans would kick up to 100% and the screen wouldn't change, just displayed what was showing before the crash.

Started troubleshooting it this week, the crashes started becoming more frequent and the screen would go black and the fans would sometimes slow down after the crash but the PC was still unresponsive, needing to be forced to turn off.

Analysed the crash dump file in C:/Windows and it returned bugcheck_error 10e VIDEO_MEMORY_MANAGEMENT_INTERNAL with arg1 being 0x33. I tried swapping out for brand new RAM I had around, still crashed. I tried fully uninstalled solidworks from the computer and that didn't help so maybe it was just a coincidence that it started when we updated. I made sure all the latest windows updates were installed and that I had the latest drivers for my video card, still crashed. Also watched CPU temps and it didn't go above 45C (113F) before it crashed.

It got pretty consistent that the PC wouldn't last more than 20 mins before crashing by this point and it sometimes crashed in boot, never got an actual BSOD though.

first thing I tried this morning was reseating the GPU and unplugging and re plugging the PSU wires to make sure all connections were good and when I turned it on I immediately smelled burning plastic. Obviously I unplugged it and haven't turned it on but one coworker claims to have smelled the burning the day before as well.

System:
16GB corsair vengance RAM
Antek Neo Eco 650W power supply
Intel i7 (i think 2200, don't remember and can't easily check)
ASUS P8P67 Pro Rev 3.1 Motherboard
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 GPU

Think the next step will be paper clip test on the PSU to see if the burning smell comes from it but if it does work I'm still worried it could be the issue and damage other components.

Any insight would be appreciated!

 

[hang-the-9]

First find out where the burning smell is coming from, most likely would be the power supply or video card, but could be the motherboard or even a melting connector like to the hard drive. You would need to start swapping out parts and testing things, but for that old of a system a full new one may be better, especially since you are using a pretty demanding program with it. Since it seems this is a work system, there is a huge cost benefit to using a faster computer, not just wasting time troubleshooting the bad one but also less time waiting for things to render, load, boot, etc..