Question What part of my pc is causing my computer to crash, how to diagnose and solve?

[anthony2hips]

Recently my PC is having issues with crashing stutters and everything with no notes or bsod. I dont know what is the problem exactly and I would appreciate some guidance on this issue. Is it the GPU or anything i'm out of ideas. This happens almost to all games I play and I cant really tell if it hardware or software issues.

 

[anthony2hips]

Are the crashes still happening when you put a load on the system?

So after playing around some games to get a better sample pool.
League Of Legend = Played 4 - 5 hours no crash
Rainbow 6 Siege = less than 1 min
Apex Legend = within 10 - 20 mins
And for added spice Heaven Benchmark Direct x11 med settings I typically crash in 10-20 mins
So weirdly yea, just a heads up, the system haves power still given to parts everything just stops. For example my RGB strafe keyboard lights up still but no waves (dunno if that helps)
Many thanks for patience again -cluesless idiot

 

[Shektron]

So after playing around some games to get a better sample pool.
League Of Legend = Played 4 - 5 hours no crash
Rainbow 6 Siege = less than 1 min
Apex Legend = within 10 - 20 mins
And for added spice Heaven Benchmark Direct x11 med settings I typically crash in 10-20 mins
So weirdly yea, just a heads up, the system haves power still given to parts everything just stops. For example my RGB strafe keyboard lights up still but no waves (dunno if that helps)
Many thanks for patience again -cluesless idiot

You never told us if you had done the memtest64 and what results you got. If memtest64 had no errors in 3 passes, my next best guess would be that your motherboard is the problem, because of how your keyboard RGB freezes as well. If your system was simply losing display but the RGB and everything else was running normally, it was more likely the GPU, but with the keyboard RGB freezing the motherboard is more likely. Just to be sure, you could try installing your GPU in a different PCI-E slot to see if it fixes the issue. If the issue somehow does get fixed, then it's a faulty PCI-e slot, but I doubt that it will fix this issue.

 

[anthony2hips]

You never told us if you had done the memtest64 and what results you got. If memtest64 had no errors in 3 passes, my next best guess would be that your motherboard is the problem, because of how your keyboard RGB freezes as well. If your system was simply losing display but the RGB and everything else was running normally, it was more likely the GPU, but with the keyboard RGB freezing the motherboard is more likely. Just to be sure, you could try installing your GPU in a different PCI-E slot to see if it fixes the issue. If the issue somehow does get fixed, then it's a faulty PCI-e slot, but I doubt that it will fix this issue.

Yea it passed the memtest64, i even pulled out each Ram stick and did it individually. I will be able to find out if its my mother board tommorow. I purchased AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor and a Sapphire Radeon RX 5600 XT 6 GB PULSE Video Card to test it, i also purchased a mobo but that will be at latest a month out

 

[Shektron]

Yea it passed the memtest64, i even pulled out each Ram stick and did it individually. I will be able to find out if its my mother board tommorow. I purchased AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor and a Sapphire Radeon RX 5600 XT 6 GB PULSE Video Card to test it, i also purchased a mobo but that will be at latest a month out

Do you have an updated BIOS on the motherboard? If not, the 3600 might not run even if the motherboard is not defective. You need the latest BIOS for full 3rd gen support on B350 boards.

 

[anthony2hips]

Do you have an updated BIOS on the motherboard? If not, the 3600 might not run even if the motherboard is not defective. You need the latest BIOS for full 3rd gen support on B350 boards.

Replacing the gpu and cpu fixed it, no more issues at all thank you

 

[Simplifiedchaos]

Anthony, I have just recently fixed a similar issue that was NOT showing up on my GTX 960 GPU - even under the heaviest load it's ever underwent on Firestrike benchmarks and the like - but it would randomly black screen and the sound would still play from the speakers and I could hear my computing responds to mouse/keyboard clicks.

I first replaced my PSU, no change whatsoever, so I ran an old GT 640 inside of the PC for a month straight with no issues, once I was convinced it was my GPU I bought a GTX 1660 TI and the problem hasn't occurred since taking out the GTX 960.

A good way to see if you are experiencing something similar - I find blank displays are usually linked to DWM.exe crashing due to one reason or another, it can be anything from bad drivers to a bad PSU to a bad GPU (like my case)

Type Event Viewer in Windows search, open it up, on the left side click on "Windows Logs" then in the middle window click "Application" then on the right hand bar "Filter Current Log" open this up and filter by "Error and Critical" only.

What you're looking for is an error that matches the time your PC crashes (look at timestamp on the error and the current PC time, should only be a few minutes prior if the crash just occurred.)

Mine was a KERNELBASE.dll error which I'm guessing is something tied to the GPU that was failing - yours may throw a different error - hopefully a nvidia.dll file error that can be easily fixed, otherwise you may have a similar hardware issue to mine.

EDIT: Would also like to note that the PC almost NEVER crashed under idle, it even ran for 2 days straight with no errors from the faulty GTX 960 before it started throwing up errors everywhere again, so the issue is extremely sporadic and I don't think it's something that can necessarily be reproduced unless it's specifically tied to one thing in your PC which I don't believe it is.

EDIT: Also, would like to point out that I was having major issues with DirectX before I got the GTX 1660 TI and even using DDU didn't solve it, I used DDU last night and did a fresh install of my NVIDIA drivers for the GTX 1660 TI and it fixed all my DirectX errors too.