PC restarts itself without any warning/blue screen while playing games.

[Sushrut_Thakur]

Hey Guys! I have my custom built PC which I assembled in Nov 2016. The specs are as follows

CPU: Intel core i3 6100 2 Cores 4 Threads
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-B150M LGA 1151
RAM: Kingston HyperX Fury 4GB DDR4 2133 MHz
GPU: Sapphire Radeon RX 470 4GB GDDR5
PSU: Corsair VS550 550W
HDD: WD Blue 1TB 7200 RPM

My case has 2 fans in front for intake and 1 fan at the rear for exhaust. I use Intel Stock cooler. No overclocking of CPU, RAM or GPU in any way.

So the problem started just recently about a week ago. I was playing NFS Payback and my display suddenly went blank and the PC wasn't turning back on.
I opened the case to see that the front panel connectors were interfering with the GPU fan and hence it must have been heating so I did some cable management and started the PC again and it worked.

But after that, while playing Mafia III, it happened again. But this time, my PC rebooted and didn't stay off like last time.
I thought the GPU may be overheating due to the game and ran some benchmarks using FurMark and saw that my GPU could handle 80-85 degrees using fans at 50% capacity without rebooting. I even did a stress test for CPU and the computer didn't reboot. It has only happened twice while playing Mafia III. I haven't seen the temperatures of my GPU while playing the game, but I suppose RX 470 should be able to handle such games at Med-High settings at 1080p.

Please provide any insights to the issue and tell me your opinion about what my problem actually might be..

PS. I have been very protective about my PC and I clean it every 6 months or so. I have a cover for it to protect it from dust. I have recently cleaned my PC when I did some cable management (mentioned above).

Thank you all for answering in advance.

 

[InvalidError]

Corsair VS is one of the worst PSU model line under the Corsair brand and a dying PSU is the most common cause of a formerly stable system randomly shutting down or restarting. You may want to try a better quality PSU such as the CX550 if you want to stick with Corsair.

 

[Sushrut_Thakur]

Corsair VS is one of the worst PSU model line under the Corsair brand and a dying PSU is the most common cause of a formerly stable system randomly shutting down or restarting. You may want to try a better quality PSU such as the CX550 if you want to stick with Corsair.

My system is stable otherwise and can go on for days without shutting down or restarting. As I have mentioned, this only happened when I played that game. Though I'll try lowering the settings and keeping a watch on the temperature, I'm not sure I understand how PSU plays a role in this. Thanks for the quick reply. I'll post the results of my tests..

 

[InvalidError]

Output capacitors in PSUs degrade over time. Poor quality PSUs have worse quality capacitors that often under-specified and degrade much faster. As they degrade, they let more supply noise through when under load and during load transients. At some point, that noise is too much for the CPU/GPU/other voltage regulators to deal with, hardware errors occur or VRM protections get tripped and the system either shutdowns or reboots to (hopefully) prevent data corruption.