Strange problem with GF's PC.

sjhuston

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Jan 28, 2015
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Hello, I'm having a problem that I cannot figure out for the life of me. About a month ago I had built a new PC for my girlfriend, I picked out all the the parts on PC part picker to make sure there were no compatibility issues, I also was looking at a step by step building guide to double check myself putting the parts in correctly at the right time. It was working perfectly for the last month, and not it has an issue that I cannot figure out. What's happening is after a while of playing a game the whole PC will seemingly "crash". It does this thing where the PC stays on, but the screen goes black and the only thing you can do is reset the whole thing. And sometimes it takes a few minutes before it's able to boot up again. I have monitored all temps while t's running a game and they are well within safe temperatures. I have used DDU and completely re-installed the video drivers, and it still does it. I ran furmark and it crashed, I'm thinking it's a faulty GPU but I'm not entirely sure. I also thought that it may be issues with the PSU but when I built the PC the one we bought (500w) was calculated to be enough for what the rig is. Any thoughts? It's driving me mad.


Specs: i5-6500

MSI GTX 1060 6gb

8gb RAM.

Edit: Lower end games such as League of Legends does not cause this problem for some reason.
 


It is your Power Supply. What happens is the GPU is starved of 12v power, and crashes. It is really that simple!
It is extremely common. My guess would be you have a generic PSU, or a Cooler Master, or a Corsair builders series.

Get a high quality power supply and your problem will vanish.


 
It's crashing under load, LoL is not a load for that computer. So heat and power would be my two first choices to look at. I'd look at temps when it crashes, not when it's working fine. Power draw is trickier because not all PSUs are created equal. A cheap 500W PSU might not actually be capable of supplying 300W, while a quality 350W PSU might be able to power your system all day long. If you have a cheap and/or no name brand PSU, that's suspect #1.
 
Bad ram would cause BSOD. A bad drive would cause BSOD. Instability would cause BSOD. A simple black screen crash where the computer seems to remain on is... while i hesitate to use the word always - it is always the power supply. If you open your Event Viewer you will see a driver failure - the driver fails because the device is starved of power. Simple as that.
 

sjhuston

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Jan 28, 2015
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It's an Evga 500b, is that bad?
 

amtseung

Distinguished


It's not what people would consider "good" by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn't a fire hazard either. If anything, you may as well try a higher quality PSU since they aren't exactly pricey. If you're confused by what's considered a good PSU, the Tom's Hardware power supply tier list would be a good resource.

500W from the power supply is not the same as 500W from the 12V rail. The two are completely different. The latter measurement (12V multiplied by the amount of amperage you can get from said 12V rail/s) is what's actually important when determining power supply wattage.