Sudden black screen and reboot during stressful applications.

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Chimaeira

Honorable
Sep 16, 2013
10
0
10,510
Hello everyone,

My rig:
GIGABYTE ga-990fxa-ud3 (AM3+)
AMD FX-8150 3.6Ghz 8 core (Fairly new)
NVIDIA GTX 770 4GB (New)
4 x 4GB RAM (Fairly new)
Sound Blaster X-fi extreme PCI
TX650W Corsair PSU (2 years old)

Since the last 6 months I have been experiencing system reboots during the most demanding applications. (Battlefield 3, two Eve windows, recently Rome 2)

The reboots occur without warning. No audio or graphic artefacts and the fans seem to be spinning at a fairly normal speed. At first I thought it was a temperature issue with the CPU chip so I installed a 2x120 CPU cooling unit. The issue persisted. Temperature no longer exceeded +/- 65 degrees Celcius. The reboots occur immediate without a hassle meaning it seems as if nothing happened when I log back into windows.

I am now wondering whether it might be my PSU that is the leading cause to these crashes. How can I tell?

I hope I have been clear in my problem description and thank you for reading.
 
Solution
ko888
Your system power consumption should reach somewhere around 400 Watts during gaming when using stock clocks for CPU and GPU.

The Corsair TX650 has more than enough capacity to power your system configuration. That doesn't mean that the PSU isn't defective.

Have you monitored the voltages in the system to see if all of the rails remain within spec during use?
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ko888

ko888

Titan
Feb 18, 2009
16,708
41
84,990
Your system power consumption should reach somewhere around 400 Watts during gaming when using stock clocks for CPU and GPU.

The Corsair TX650 has more than enough capacity to power your system configuration. That doesn't mean that the PSU isn't defective.

Have you monitored the voltages in the system to see if all of the rails remain within spec during use?
 
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Solution
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Chimaeira

Honorable
Sep 16, 2013
10
0
10,510
I ran Prime95 for a couple of hours without issues. I then ran Furmark's GPU torture test without problems. Starting them at the same time rebooted my PC 100% of the time and always immediately. I felt that this was a strong case for power failure, i nthis case powering my GPU and CPU at highj performance at the same time.

I bought a Corsair CX750M and after installing my problems are gone. I can run both Prime and Furmark at the same time.

Looking back at the voltages it does seem that the new PSU has more stability. Especially on the -12V rail. I could not find a lot of info about this rail and what it powered so I neglected it and figured it was normal to fluctuate.
 
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ko888

ko888

Titan
Feb 18, 2009
16,708
41
84,990
-12V rail - This rail is pretty much obsolete now and is only kept on to provide backward compatibility with older hardware. Some older types of serial port circuits required both -12V and +12V voltages, but since almost no one except industrial users use serial ports anymore you, as a typical home user, can pretty much disregard this rail.
 
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Chimaeira

Honorable
Sep 16, 2013
10
0
10,510
The story had a strange twist. After installing the new PSU I had another reboot during the loading screen of Battlefield 4. It seemed that my system was still very unstable. I had been testing different settings for hours until someone pointed me towards the APM Master Mode in the bios.

I disabled it and haven't crashed since. I do not understand what this mode does exactly as sources on the internet tell different things but it solved my problem. I run Battlefield 4 fine on Ultra so there's no noticeable performance hit.

Perhaps it has to do with the FX8150's turbo mode and my Mobo not being able to cope with it properly.
 
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