Question Strange instant PC crashes [solved]

Jan 25, 2021
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Hi everyone, I'm having a weird issue with a recent PC build I did.

I build the system using mostly new components (except for my couple of years old PSU and my gtx980TI).
However under certain somewhat specific circumstances my pc will instantly shutdown and restart, no BSOD, just black and restarting.

The conditions that I found are either right when launching a match of the game Teamfight tactics (usually only when i have any websites opened while launching, and after a crash when trying to reconnect as well), as well having these crashes always happen during the second round of a match of rainbow six siege.

This struck me as very strange, especially as I had hardware monitoring running during the exact crash conditions and crashes, and I was nowhere near any thermal/load limits at these times. I have also already played many hours of the much more demanding Cyberpunk 2077 on much higher settings without any pc crashes, and after encountering the issue I have stress tested my PSU, my CPU, my RAM, and my GPU using OCCT, as well as having ran heaven benchmark after building, and having run windows memory diagnostics, all of these ran without encountering any issues, on top of running the system at much much higher loads than those that occur during the crashes.

I'm not great at understanding the output of the event viewer, I mostly found the "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."

related system event:
NetBT 4311
000000000100320000000000D71000C013010000250200C000000000000000000000000000000000

Solution:
So far the problem appears to be resolved by uninstalling NordVPN, it appears that the NordVPN drivers can cause this issue, solution found on other forum:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...t/d89adc8b-63cc-4fbb-84cd-f994f5416074?page=2
 
Last edited:
Jan 25, 2021
5
2
15
I did further testing (well, randomly trying things without having tried any of the things repeatedly yet) and it seems like the system did not do the instant crash under conditions where it normally would, after I disabled two nvidia audio drivers. That being said, I also tried completely reinstalling all nvidia drivers (graphics driver package with geforce experience includes both these audio drivers as well), and this did not fix the problem, only having both drivers disabled seems to prevent these crashes (though I have only had a few minutes of trying now, it might just be that they randomly didnt occur as they weren't a 100% reliable.)

The problem then is that these nvidia drivers are actually needed for me in home use, I coudl still use the default audio driver for most cases, but I also stream using nvidia shadowplay to my android tv, and this can no longer connect now that the drivers are disabled.. Is there an underlying issue that could cause this as the drivers are the ones that nvidia recommends? (and i also had these same crashes on an older nvidia driver just after finishing the build)
 
There are many things that can cause a pc to crash.
What are the CPU/GPU temps?
Did you test the ram with memtest86?
Motherboard BIOS up to date?
After you have done those things i would consider a complete reinstall of windows,to remove any potential malware.
 
Jan 25, 2021
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CPU temp during 1H stresstest reached a max temp of 87 degrees C (rated for 95 max) GPU reached a max temp of 80 degrees. (though both are well below 45 degrees C during the crashes)

I did not test with memtest yet, I'll do that next, but I did use OCCT memory stresstest, OCCT stability test, and windows memory diagnostic several times without any encountered errors.

Motherboard bios is at least a very recent version as that was needed before it could even boot to be able to work with the new gen ryzen processor I'm using.

Malware is always possible I guess, but it does seem unlikely due to it being such a new system, and due to it maybe seeming related to the nvidia audio drivers now..
 
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CPU temp during 1H stresstest reached a max temp of 87 degrees C (rated for 95 max) GPU reached a max temp of 80 degrees. (though both are well below 45 degrees C during the crashes)

I did not test with memtest yet, I'll do that next, but I did use OCCT memory stresstest, OCCT stability test, and windows memory diagnostic several times without any encountered errors.

Motherboard bios is at least a very recent version as that was needed before it could even boot to be able to work with the new gen ryzen processor I'm using.

Malware is always possible I guess, but it does seem unlikely due to it being such a new system, and due to it maybe seeming related to the nvidia audio drivers now..
Finally someone who takes care of his pc,do the memtest,if that doesnt solve the issue im afraid you will have to reinstall windows.
 
Jan 25, 2021
5
2
15
Finally someone who takes care of his pc,do the memtest,if that doesnt solve the issue im afraid you will have to reinstall windows.
Memtest returned no errors found, as I'm already relying on using the pc for both work and studying apart from gaming I was very reluctant to reinstall windows. That's why I dove back into the event viewer and found some errors that happened during startup (which I at first dismissed due to them happening after a crash) looking this up online led me to a certain forum post filled with other people experiencing similar crashes only during specific games:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...t/d89adc8b-63cc-4fbb-84cd-f994f5416074?page=2

In this post it seems everybody experiencing this (like me) uses NordVPN, and uninstalling that fixes the crashes (so far worked for me as well, though of course for me it is premature to tell, it seems that the people in the mentioned post have had good results. Also this cause makes more sense due to their being specific netwerk requests just before most crashes, perhaps something that a NordVPN driver interferes with. (even though nord was not running at those times)

I'm hopeful for this fixing the issue, and will update this post if it turns out not to have worked, in any case thanks for the help!
 
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