Question Solving Freezing and Game Crashing

[MrMeowmers]

Howdy folks,

So more recently I've begun to notice several games of mine freezing and crashing, followed by a spike of the GPU usage in task manager, before it fully crashes to desktop, sometimes with errors, sometimes without.

In some cases, I've had a complete PC freeze (usually the audio continues, but video cuts out, only happened once or twice.) But most cases, I have a sudden freeze, both monitors, before the game crashes. I noticed it first with Bannerlord, and it has since carried into other games now, including ones that I've previously had no issues with.

Just the other day, I took a can of air and vacuum to my GPU, as well as my CPU and the cooler, and it hasn't seemed to solve anything. Whenever I check the temperatures, it doesn't seem to be spiking that high, and it stabilizes again very quickly even if so. What can I do to begin trouble shooting this? I've done a complete reinstall of the graphics drivers using DDU in safemode, resetting my NVidia settings back to the default as well.
Frankly, I'd like to avoid reinstalling windows or even just refreshing it as I don't believe it is the problem in this case.

My PSU MAY be getting old, possibly, but the video card shouldn't have any issues, and my experience is limited, but this doesn't seem like a video card failure.
I'm in the works of upgrading from my old MOBO/CPU/RAM and PSU, but don't have the funds to complete the upgrade just yet. (Currently I have a i7 4770, MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate, and 16 gigs of G.Skill Ares 1366 RAM, and a Corsair 650W power supply [green labe].)

Please, if anyone has an idea on how I can begin troubleshooting my issues, I'd greatly appreciate it.

(It also may not be a GPU issue, if I'm totally honest. I don't get how I can play KSP and crash, but then go and play Star Citizen for hours with no issue... But given the GPU spikes, I figured maybe something was up.)

Cheers, have a good evening!

 

[AppleGwava]

We can start with a series of escalating tests

Run a malware scan (Probably not going to help but might as well cover all the bases)

Visually inspect your computer for anything odd ( Leaky/Bulging capacitors, loose components, oxdised or burst/rusty parts)

Run a stress test in Safe mode

Use only 1 stick of ram and try the stress test/Games

Strip the computer to the minimun, using the iGpu

Maybe you can try monitoring voltages using Msi afterburner/( Your preferred flavour of OC monitoring software) and watch for voltage spikes

Wishing all the best,
Alvis

 

[MrMeowmers]

We can start with a series of escalating tests

Run a malware scan (Probably not going to help but might as well cover all the bases)

Visually inspect your computer for anything odd ( Leaky/Bulging capacitors, loose components, oxdised or burst/rusty parts)

Run a stress test in Safe mode

Use only 1 stick of ram and try the stress test/Games

Strip the computer to the minimun, using the iGpu

Maybe you can try monitoring voltages using Msi afterburner/( Your preferred flavour of OC monitoring software) and watch for voltage spikes

Wishing all the best,
Alvis

I'll give these a try over the next few days, got some work I might put into my motorbike tomorrow, hah.

First, sleep! Appreciate the rapid response, I'll be sure to try a few of these tomorrow if I can, though!

 

[AppleGwava]

I'll give these a try over the next few days, got some work I might put into my motorbike tomorrow, hah.

First, sleep! Appreciate the rapid response, I'll be sure to try a few of these tomorrow if I can, though!

Haha, good night! My trick to quick response is to live somewhere on the other side of the world. Still bright as day here

 

[MrMeowmers]

Haha, good night! My trick to quick response is to live somewhere on the other side of the world. Still bright as day here

So something odd that I just noticed on Speccy... My video card is listed as having 4gb of VRAM. But the card is supposed to have 8, is it not reading right, or has some of my VRAM failed?

EDIT: Okay, GPU-Z is reading 8096, so that's good. Why would Speccy misread as 4095..?

 

[MrMeowmers]

Okay, so before I opened my comptuer case and such, I decided to run KSP with GPU-Z open to monitor load, temps, voltage etc. I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary when KSP decided to freeze and crash, no spikes or surges, the GPU load was at 95+ for most of the actual playtime, but that shouldn't be the issue.

I might still do those checks later, but I'm uh... Starting to wonder if it's just one of the mods I've got enabled that's causing crashes. :/ I might just be an idiot and am blaming this on my card, I just ran a vanilla game of KSP and had no problems completing one quick mission that likely would have crashed me otherwise.

EDIT: So, I removed some of the visual mods I tend to play the game with, and it seems to not crash anymore. However, I did have a look at the event viewer logs, and did find this log following the last time it crashed: https://pastebin.com/fQaaGvX5

I believe the DLL attached is an NVidia driver?