While Gaming the Monitors go into standby and the pc becomes unresponsive

[zelldeb]

This started with the windows 10 update 1607 which I got on 9/24/16. After playing a video game for anywhere from 20 to 90 minutes the monitors go black and report that they are going into standby. The PC fans continue to run, the LCD screen on my g19 Logitech keyboard freezes and neither the keyboard nor the mouse will do anything. The only way to get the pc to do anything is to hit the hard reset button. After this the only error windows shows is that I did a hard reset.

It does not appear to matter what video game I am playing, this first happened with Civilization V, running through Steam, but it also happens on Age of empires III, as well as the new Kings Quest. I thought maybe it was a Steam issue. It also happens playing Dragon Age Inquisition. I have dual monitors; it does appear to happen faster if I’m playing a video on the 2nd monitor. My first thought was heat. I got out the can of compressed air, it wasn’t that dirty but I did it anyway. I used the monitoring software from my motherboard manufacturer to watch the CPU temp while I was gaming, it never got over 52C. I have also had various issues over the years with my Logitech g19 having compatibility issues so I replaced it with a generic dell keyboard and rebooted without the Logitech software, still the same issue.

I have an AMD FX-8350 Black Edition Vishera 8-Core 4.0 GHz (4.2 GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W FD8350FRHKBOX Desktop Processor, MSI 990FXA-GD65V2 Desktop Motherboard - AMD 990FX Chipset - Socket AM3+, MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) DirectX 11 N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II 2GD5/OC 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16, and Mushkin Enhanced Redline 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000) Desktop Memory Model 997121

I also saw mentioned similar issues due to not having a large enough power supply. I have CORSAIR GS series GS800 800W ATX12V v2.3 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply and on my APC UPS, I rarely see over 200W being used and that includes one monitor being plugged into it too.

I thought I should also mention that at the same time this occured the famous "waiting for cache" error that causes google chrome to freeze the entire pc for up to a minute or more returned. i have not dealt with it on this pc since windows 7 until now

 

[zelldeb]

So I have been doing a lot of reading here and there about similar issues, and everyone who has these issues appears to have problems either with overheating or a component going bad.

I downloaded a program called HWInfo. It also shows GPU temperature as well as CPU. the hottest i ever saw the cpu get was 55C but it usually ran in the upper 40's. the GPU got up to 104C a couple of times but mostly ran in the upper 80's or low 90's. it also has never shown more than 420W of power usage.

i have successfully played a video game with nothing else running for at least 90 minutes a couple of times now, one time when I was at about 120 minutes of play time i started playing a movie on my second monitor, within 15 minutes of doing this both monitors shut off and the PC froze up again.

My PC is only 3 years old, and the two most likely suspects to me at this point seem to be the video card or the power supply. since i found a nvidia 730gt 2gb video card on newegg for 35 bucks and since this seems to happen most frequently when i am doing something on multiple displays simultaneously i thought i would try it out and see if that fixes the issue. i will report on how it does after i replace it and run for a while.

i wanted to mention that i did have an issue about 7 months ago when my cpu fan stopped working and when my cpu overheated the whole system shut off, not like this time where only the monitors did, then the entire system shut off. within just a few minutes of turning it back on i discovered the problem and shut it down again. at this time i went ahead and removed the heat sink and replaced the heat paste with new arctic silver, just because. after replacing the defective fan I have since had no other issues until 3 weeks ago when this present issue started.