- Oct 9, 2017
- 8
- 1
- 4,515
As the title suggests my PC is shutting down during use. time-to-shut-down appears to be related to GPU load (discussed below).
SPECS:
My system is an HP pavilion 500-141ea desktop, which I have made some piecemeal changes to over the five years I've used(https://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c03936079).
Case: Stock case that came with the system. Not the best ventilated, and only a single fan.
PSU: Corsair CX 550 (purchased 4 years ago to provide power to GPU).
Motherboard: JasmineR MSI-7778 (stock)
CPU: AMD A10-5800k (upgraded 18 months ago as I saw one cheap on eBay and wanted to learn how to change out a CPU. Has caused no issues I'm aware of).
CPU fan: a Coolermaster unit that came with the CPU. Yes, I did remember to remove the protective film from the contact and apply thermal compound xD.
GPU: MSI branded Radeon R7 260x
RAM: 14gb, PCI 128000, 1600MHz. (the stock 4Gb + 2Gb sticks, plus an 8Gb stick)
Storage: 1tb HDD (stock) + Kingston 256GB SSD (on which the OS and games etc live).
CD/DVD-RW drive: removed. I never used it and wanted space to better cable manage.
SITUATION:
About 2 weeks ago my PC shut down unexpectedly while playing Kenshi (a game). I ran the game a few more times and found it pretty reliably shut down after about 12 minutes from loading into the game. I also tested the behavior in DayZ and XCOM and found similar results. To further test the behavior I let the PC idle on the desktop, and it did eventually shut down. While I confess that I forgot to run a timer; I'd say this took around 1hr 30mins.
TESTING/WHAT I'VE TRIED:
Over the last 2 months I had been getting very occasional failures to boot up (power light and fan active, but no output to the monitor or keyboard RGB). As I had suspected this might be failure to POST, I thought perhaps that the shutting down was due to the PSU. I also considered that there may be some issue with the CPU/Fan that I installed around 18 months ago. I ran kenshi while running CPU temp, and found that while the PC did shut down again, CPU temp never climbed above 65C. I ran this test several times.
Fortunately, I was able to borrow a PSU from a friend to test this. While I have not had failure to boot up (?failure to post), the PC still shuts down suddenly after some length of time and this still appears to relate to GPU load.
To further investigate I downloaded MSI afterburner to monitor GPU temp, and ran heven benchmark. from an idle temp (just booted) for around 55C the GPU temp climbed to 103C and then shut down within 4 minutes. Based on all this I believe the primary issue is the GPU overheating and forcing shutdown.
?POSSIBLE SOLUTION:
While I don't want to spend any large sums of money on such an old system... I was hoping to get another year or two out of it as I'd then have considerably more income to fund a build. Other than a new system, it seems to me that I have 2 options: a new GPU and/or a better case (from a cooling perspective). I'd guess a new case alone wouldn't fix the issue though.
I believe the best GPU my system would be able to use would be a GTX 1050ti? These are going for £40-60 on eBay. As I've never been overly concerned with bleeding-edge graphics I think I'd willing to use this card at first in a new build also - unless it is unlikely to be compatible with a DDR4 motherboard or whatever is the standard in a year or two? Of course, I'd update it after a while, but that'd let me save separately for the GPU at that time.
Case-wise: this case (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thermaltak...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=E9RR6ECWST8RTYZXZKSN) seems to have been well-reviewed as the best budget option in several places. If it seemed likely to help when combined with a new GPU then I wouldn't mind forking out the £30 for it also.... and I confess I'd be happy to not be cramming my hands back into the stock HP case ever again!
CONCLUSION:
So the conclusion of my (amateur) investigation is that the shutdown behavior is due to GPU overheating. I believe this may be solved by picking up a new graphics card, perhaps a 1050ti. But I'm farrrrr from a l33t tech hax0r, so I wanted to run this all by the fine folks at tom's to see if there is anything else I should test, if it sounds like my conclusion is correct, and get advice about what to do about it.
SPECS:
My system is an HP pavilion 500-141ea desktop, which I have made some piecemeal changes to over the five years I've used(https://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c03936079).
Case: Stock case that came with the system. Not the best ventilated, and only a single fan.
PSU: Corsair CX 550 (purchased 4 years ago to provide power to GPU).
Motherboard: JasmineR MSI-7778 (stock)
CPU: AMD A10-5800k (upgraded 18 months ago as I saw one cheap on eBay and wanted to learn how to change out a CPU. Has caused no issues I'm aware of).
CPU fan: a Coolermaster unit that came with the CPU. Yes, I did remember to remove the protective film from the contact and apply thermal compound xD.
GPU: MSI branded Radeon R7 260x
RAM: 14gb, PCI 128000, 1600MHz. (the stock 4Gb + 2Gb sticks, plus an 8Gb stick)
Storage: 1tb HDD (stock) + Kingston 256GB SSD (on which the OS and games etc live).
CD/DVD-RW drive: removed. I never used it and wanted space to better cable manage.
SITUATION:
About 2 weeks ago my PC shut down unexpectedly while playing Kenshi (a game). I ran the game a few more times and found it pretty reliably shut down after about 12 minutes from loading into the game. I also tested the behavior in DayZ and XCOM and found similar results. To further test the behavior I let the PC idle on the desktop, and it did eventually shut down. While I confess that I forgot to run a timer; I'd say this took around 1hr 30mins.
TESTING/WHAT I'VE TRIED:
Over the last 2 months I had been getting very occasional failures to boot up (power light and fan active, but no output to the monitor or keyboard RGB). As I had suspected this might be failure to POST, I thought perhaps that the shutting down was due to the PSU. I also considered that there may be some issue with the CPU/Fan that I installed around 18 months ago. I ran kenshi while running CPU temp, and found that while the PC did shut down again, CPU temp never climbed above 65C. I ran this test several times.
Fortunately, I was able to borrow a PSU from a friend to test this. While I have not had failure to boot up (?failure to post), the PC still shuts down suddenly after some length of time and this still appears to relate to GPU load.
To further investigate I downloaded MSI afterburner to monitor GPU temp, and ran heven benchmark. from an idle temp (just booted) for around 55C the GPU temp climbed to 103C and then shut down within 4 minutes. Based on all this I believe the primary issue is the GPU overheating and forcing shutdown.
?POSSIBLE SOLUTION:
While I don't want to spend any large sums of money on such an old system... I was hoping to get another year or two out of it as I'd then have considerably more income to fund a build. Other than a new system, it seems to me that I have 2 options: a new GPU and/or a better case (from a cooling perspective). I'd guess a new case alone wouldn't fix the issue though.
I believe the best GPU my system would be able to use would be a GTX 1050ti? These are going for £40-60 on eBay. As I've never been overly concerned with bleeding-edge graphics I think I'd willing to use this card at first in a new build also - unless it is unlikely to be compatible with a DDR4 motherboard or whatever is the standard in a year or two? Of course, I'd update it after a while, but that'd let me save separately for the GPU at that time.
Case-wise: this case (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thermaltak...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=E9RR6ECWST8RTYZXZKSN) seems to have been well-reviewed as the best budget option in several places. If it seemed likely to help when combined with a new GPU then I wouldn't mind forking out the £30 for it also.... and I confess I'd be happy to not be cramming my hands back into the stock HP case ever again!
CONCLUSION:
So the conclusion of my (amateur) investigation is that the shutdown behavior is due to GPU overheating. I believe this may be solved by picking up a new graphics card, perhaps a 1050ti. But I'm farrrrr from a l33t tech hax0r, so I wanted to run this all by the fine folks at tom's to see if there is anything else I should test, if it sounds like my conclusion is correct, and get advice about what to do about it.
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