PC shuts down UNLESS playing games?

tehjoeman · Mar 14, 2013

Hello esteemed community. I am experiencing a problem in which my computer will "shut down" unless playing a game. That's right - I have to play a game in order to prevent it. I can launch a game and minimize it, and go about my business, but I must have a game (any game) running to have a fully functioning PC. Otherwise, my computer will stay powered, yet my monitor goes to "sleep" and I am unable to "wake" my PC. I keep my GPU fan at 100%, and when this happens, my fan is reverted to it's default 30%.

I have tried swapping my PSU, CPU, re-seating all RAM, re-seating my GPU, re-installing GFX card drivers, re-installing Windows 7...just about everything. I am led to believe it may be a MoBo problem now? I have no crash dumps in event viewer.

It is causing me no end of headache.

Here is my PC, ask if you need more details:
Optiplex 745 Mini-Tower.
Q6600 CPU @ 2.4 GHz (No overclock)
5GB DDR2/667 RAM
160GB Seagate Barracuda 7,200 RPM
Sapphire Radeon HD 6670 Low-Profile
Cooler Master 500w eXtreme Power Plus
Q965 Chipset

I have the latest BIOS revision. I have reset BIOS to factory. If anyone has any helpful ideas/suggestions, please don't hesitate. I'm not going to rule anything out at this point. Thank you.

Cons29 · Mar 14, 2013

try using the pc with bare hardware. meaning remove the gpu (if you have igp), use 1 stick of ram, etc. just enough to make it run. if it runs ok, then add 1 hardware then test, rinse and repeat

HEXiT · Mar 14, 2013

go into power managment features and set the pc power profile to high perfomance. then stop the monitor form going to sleep mode.
also go into bios and set hpet(if available) and make sure you have wake on keyboard and mouse enabled.

techgeek · Mar 14, 2013

Problems with computers not coming out of sleep or for that matter going into sleep are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot.

Most issues with not coming out of sleep most often turn out to be either motherboard or graphics card. With motherboards often the resolution comes from a BIOS update. Just because you're running the latest BIOS, doesn't mean that it's still not the BIOS, it just could be that the manufacturer hasn't fixed it yet. In your case, seeing how old your system is, that's unlikely. On the graphics front, unless you have another graphics card you can try, it maybe hard to narrow it down to that.

It seems to me the simple solution would to be not let your computer go to sleep. Now before you jump on me about having already done that, just give me a moment. In a round about way you've stopped your system from going to sleep by running an application that keeps your computer from going to sleep. This is less than ideal as your are using up a lot of power running you CPU and GPU up, not to mention all the heat. The simpler solution would be to go into Power Manangement and set it to not go to sleep. In approaching it this way, it will allow your CPU to run at idle, and your GPU to throttle down. Now it's still going to use more power than a sleep mode, but it certainly going to use less power than your present solution.

Let us know how you make out.

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PC shuts down UNLESS playing games?

tehjoeman

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