Temperature Problems and driver issues possibly caused by temperatures?

[John1310]

Hi everyone!

Ok, I'm fairly new to the PC world. I just bought a custom built PC a couple weeks ago now and it is my first PC I have owned in probably about 7 years (been on a macbook for that time). This is the first time for me to get into individual components and really start to understand what's going on under hood, so please bare with me if I'm not 100% familiar with all the intricacies.

First of all here are my specs:

- Motherboard: Gigabye GA-H81M-DS2
- CPU: Intel Core I7-4790
- GPU: Zotac GTX 970
- RAM: 8GB Visipro (Single card)
- HDD WD Blue 250GB
- PSU Corsair HP600 (Hyper Series)
- Case: CoolerMaster N400 (ATX)

I bought each component separately from the same shop and they asked me if I needed a hand to build it (which I did). They built the whole thing for me.

My Problem:

I've been experiencing a few crashes when playing the witcher 3. At first it was giving me a BSOD (DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION) which happened 3 times. I started to have a look at what could be causing this and I updated all my drivers, etc.

After this, the game would sometimes crash to desktop with an alert saying the display driver failed and has recovered and sometimes it wouldn't give me any alert message.

I noticed that my GPU fans (stock) were running at max 48% and the GPU was at 81C when under 100% load from the Witcher 3. At the same time my CPU would hit temps between 75C and 78C when playing the Witcher 3 as well.

I went to the BIOS to set my CPU stock fan at 1.5 times the temperature so the fans would run a little faster and used Afterburner to get my GPU fans going.

Now my GPU hits 75C on Ultra settings and 70C on the Nvidia Geforce experience recommended settings which is a bit better. My CPU however still hits the 78C mark when playing on Ultra and 75C on Geforce Experience settings. My fans are running at 100% at that temp and it does seem a bit high for a CPU doen't it?

One strange thing about the CPU is that it hit 92% utilization when Playing the Witcher 3 with nothing else running in the background. Is this normal?

Since bringing the temp of my GPU down to 70-75C I don't seem to be experiencing any crashes anymore but I've only had 1 day testing it.

I live in Indonesia where the ambient temperature hovers between 25C and 32C year round so I guess this has an effect on it.

So my question is:

- Whether these temperatures are normal?
- Is it normal that my CPU reaches 92% load playing Witcher 3?
- Could temperatures have been the culprit of these crashes?


Thank you so much for your help guys, it was on this very same forum that I got advice on what components to get and it's been very helpful.

Since I tweeked

 

[stevepre]

Try reseating the ram. Check AA with witcher 3-might want to lower it a level and see how it goes. When it crashes again check the system logs for details.

 

[John1310]

Try reseating the ram. Check AA with witcher 3-might want to lower it a level and see how it goes. When it crashes again check the system logs for details.

High stevepre, thank you for your help.

You are thinking I should reseat the RAM to solve which issue? Sorry as I said I'm new to this, just curious if it's to deal with hear issues or driver crashes. I've run MemTest for about 2 hours (it went through 1.5 full loop) and there were no issues if that makes a difference.

Puting AA to a lower level would help with which component?