PC instantly crashes when loading games and restarts, don't know how to further go :c

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Johannes Kuckertz

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Dec 31, 2013
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Hi guys,

So, i've had some problems already with my pc and all the past ones I managed to get fixed (also with the help of forums in here :D). But i'm just stuck with this one and I would appreciate a lot if you guys would manage to help me out of this one.

Specs:
EVGA Geforce GTX 660Ti
Intel Core i7 3770k
12 gb ram
Corsair 800W
Asus P8Z77-V

So, I just bought Watch Dogs and i'm crazy to play it, but it doesn't get past that Ubisoft intro and my pc restarts out of nowhere. This happens with many other games too, like BF4, LoL, etc.

What I have already tried is: running BIOS with optimized settings, but when I do that, the gpu goes with 4000 something MHz and it just starts crashing even earlier and also outside games, but with BSOD. I decided to turn Turbo Mode off, so it turns into only 3600 Mhz and the PC gets stable, until I start gaming. I've also tried to underclock it and the PC crashes instantly.
Oh, when I turned off Turbo Mode in order to get only 3600 Mhz on the clock speed of the CPU, it would go sometimes off and then give me that Asus Anti-Surge Trigger. It was annoying enough for me to disable it, and as I said, it now only instantly crashes and restarts after starting a game.

I don't know at all if the defect is on a configuration, on the GPU, CPU or PSU, i'm totally desperate ;-;.

Once again, thanks if any of you manages to help me out!
 
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InvalidError

InvalidError

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If you get Anti-Surge messages, it means your PSU's outputs most likely went far enough out of spec to trip the motherboard's over-voltage protections.

Basically, your motherboard is telling you it is receiving bad power. (Or at least that its protection circuitry does not like the power it is seeing.)

The way most such protections operate when they trip is by shorting power rails to ground, which clamps the voltage surges and forces the PSU to shut down from overload.
 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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Dec 31, 2013
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Oooh, I didn't knew that. Do you have any suggestions of what I could do to solve it?
 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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The thing is, when I do this, my CPU goes on what seems to be a quite big clock speed (4315 Mhz) and the pc doesn't even stays stable, it just goes BSOD. I then turnet the Turbo Mode, etc. off to make it at least run normally when i'm not gaming and with the Power surge detection off (which I don't know if I should actually have turned off) :c

 
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InvalidError

InvalidError

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If you had anti-surge trip warnings, turned anti-surge off and still get reboots whenever you do something CPU/GPU-intensive, it likely means the PSU is putting out enough noise to cause downstream regulators to malfunction and in turn cause their loads to malfunction. In many cases, those downstream chips will cause a hard-reset when they detect that they ended up in an impossible or otherwise unrecoverable state.

At any rate, anti-surge does indicate that the PSU needs to be investigated - if outputs are clean and within spec, you should not be getting those messages - output voltages usually need to be out by 10-20% to trip protections while the ATX spec allows only a 5% deviation from nominal. Unless the protection thresholds are awfully tight, the protections tripping should indicate that the PSU was 2-4X out of tolerance at the time the protections got triggered for some reason.

If the PSU is a few years old, one of the most common reasons is under-rated or low-quality output caps starting to fail. If the PSU is only a few weeks/months old, it could be that some of the capacitors suffered mechanical damage during manufacturing, shipping, assembly, etc. such as a broken lead - possibly internally.

The only way to know for certain would be to plug in an oscilloscope and look at exactly what happens during the microseconds just before the computer reboots.
 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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Just a small update, i'm still having the problem but I've seen that my 12V rail is running with ~11,5V sometimes higher and sometimes lower. Is that significant enough to cause these (annoying) restarts in my system ? I've seen this in BIOS and many people just say that you shouldn't trust that info.
It was also suggested that I should update my BIOS. Would that maybe solve this ?
 
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InvalidError

InvalidError

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The system management chip that monitors voltages is not a precision measurement instrument; it merely gives you a general idea of what might be going on there. 11.5V would be somewhat on the low side but still within the 5% tolerance allowed by the ATX standard.

Voltages in BIOS do not mean much (unless they far enough out of spec to exceed the ATX tolerances and tolerances on the monitoring chip itself) since rails may go up/down depending on loads on other rails (this is called cross-loading) so if you want to have a better idea of exactly what is happening, you have to look at it live while setting up the scenario you want to examine.

Updating the BIOS is unlikely to make any difference.

BTW, anti-surge is usually meant to protect against excessive voltage so in principle, you should have at least one rail rising too far above spec when it trips.
 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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I see. I will check the other rails, I admit having ignored them. Want to give this problem and end so baaaad :p

 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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Checked it, everything related to the rails is actually fine. Just "playing around" in the BIOS, I turned X.M.P on, my memory frequency went up do 1600, and I left it so to check if maybe that would do something. Well, it did something good. I manage to run Watchdogs for a small while now (better than crashing before it even ended loading xD), but after a time, my pc screen goes off, I don't know which fan, but one goes very crazy fast and it restarts as usual. So, I don't know if it is progress, but does anyone of you guys have an idea what this means?

I also ran some benchmark tests and it went pretty well, no crashes at all :3
 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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Hmm, do you think applying a new layer of thermal paste would have, possibly, good effects ?

Btw, thanks a lot for all the help you're giving!! :]
 
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zenx

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Hi there!
It could be a temperature issue as others have pointed out especially on those high freqs.
Watch Dogs for some reason is very CPU intensive and the stock intel cooler just can't handle it (just bought a new cooler for the very same reason)
Also be sure that your computer's inside is dust-free... clean it out with an air compressor or something..

You could try testing with prime95 (first option of stress test) only stressing the cpu to see if it actually crashes from overheating

Cheers
 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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I stress tested the CPU with prime95 and it did pretty fine. My CPU is watercooled though. But I will reapply the thermal paste just to make sure that isn't what is causing my pc to crash.

I did ran HWMonitor in the background and the CPU temps were not extreeemely high. But my GPU temps go to 75ºC (Nvidia GTX 660Ti). Is that a very high temperature for this GPU ?
 
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zenx

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Those CPU temps are normal however the GPU temp depends.. if you were reading those temperatures while any 3d app or graphic intensive program such as games were running then those are normal as well.. but for idle gpu temp it it is high - for example (I have watch dogs running in the bg and tabbed out my gpu temp is at 45 C)
 
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zenx

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You can try removing the side panel from your rig, maybe airflow is blocked to the GPU or maybe the GPU heatsink is filled with dust - also check your GPU fans if they are running and try to see if games load like that and what temperatures does the GPU reach while playing.
Ideally you would want the GPU below 80 C (they tend to get hotter than CPU-s and that's normal) and above 90 is where things start to get messed up...
If your temps stay in safe ranges then it could also be a software issue - will check back later to see what you discovered! Cheers!
 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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Yea, when i'm outside a game my cpu is running at ~37ºC and GPU at 33ºC. When I load a game, CPU goes to around 60ºC and GPU 75ºC.
I applied the water cooling system again (removed some of the dirt on the heat sink) and reapplied new thermal paste on my CPU. And the temps keep pretty much the same as last time. I did managed to game a bit longer this time, but my watercooling fans started going crazy after this longer period of time.

:S
 
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zenx

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Ooookay :)

I looked into some info on your motherboard. Apparently it has a bunch of auto-overclocking features in the bios as well in windows.
So let's get rid of the windows one first since that's most likely causing the problems in case you have it :)
If by any chance you have something called "AI Suite" installed on your system, you should try uninstalling it since from what I've read that actually tries to overclock everything on the fly based on system load.. and it has a nice habit of adjusting a bunch of voltages which would also explain the anti-surge events... and also as InvalidError pointed out modifying your fan speed (well... indirectly.. by cranking your cpu prolly somewhere above 5 ghz :))) )
In case you don't have it installed then it's back to the bios and you should disable most of the auto overclocking you can find there (leave the XMP profile for your memory as those are actually meant to be used since the're compatible in the first place)

Cheers! and keep us posted!
 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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Yes I do have Asus AI suite installed, will get rid of it right now xD

Once again, thank you and InvalidError for all the help you guys are giving me :)

 
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Johannes Kuckertz

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Oooooh, seems to have made some good stuff. I manage to play for quite longer now (the fan still seems to like to go crazy , lol xD). Now my screen goes black sometimes, but without restarting. It goes black, then comes back and a small dialog box appears "Nvidia Driver has stopped working" and something with Kernel.

Edit: Now it actually started to crash when running Furmark and also before some games even really start. Damn;-;
 
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InvalidError

InvalidError

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You have basically three possible causes for this:
1- corrupted OS/drivers putting the GPU in an invalid state it cannot recover from
2- defective GPU ending up in an invalid state the drivers cannot recover from
3- bad power corrupting the GPU

The "easiest" way would be to plug an oscilloscope with limit-testing triggers on the rail, use the system until it shutdowns or reboots and see what happened on the scope.

Without that, your next "best" choice is to start parts-swapping if you have spare systems with known-good parts to swap parts with. If problems follow a given part between systems, you know that part has something to do with it.
 
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