My system specs are:
MSI Z87I
Intel LGA1150 i5 4670k
Crucial DDR3 BallistiX Sport 16GB
Windows 7
Cooler Master G500
MSI Geforce GTX970 "Twin Frozr V" 4GB
Kingston HyperX SSD
WD Green SATA (as a storage/secondary hard disk drive)
Basic fan cooling.
Back in June of this year (2015) I upgraded my pc, with the above mentioned GTX 970 and the two new RAM sticks. The pc works just fine through all of July and August, then last week I go on vacation. I come back turn on the pc (which has not been touched at all while I was gone) and the pc starts randomly crashing. This has been going on all week. Usually the pc crashes while in an intensive game, or while stressing the computer, but it also sometimes crashes when I am doing nothing more than watching a single video on youtube. The crashes can happen every few minutes, or there can be hours between every crash.
The crashes can happen regardless of the temperature of the graphics card, but usually happen after the graphics card climbs above 60*C (when I'm stressing it in other words).
I don't overclock my card.
The only thing I know I did with the computer the day after coming back from vacation was installing the newest driver update from nvidia. There was also some pretty bad rain storms the week I was away, but my neighbors can not recall that there were any thunder and lightning storms that week. The power did not go out while I was gone, as my digital clock was fine when I got back and it resets to 00.00 when it looses power.
After a lot of testing I have discovered what happens, but not how or what is responsible for it.
The screen goes black, and the monitor displays no signal. I have tried with both a DVI cable and a HDMI cable, so it's not the cable. Then the pc reboots automatically, but the graphics card is not part of the reboot. The fans on the graphics card stop running, it's like it lost power. Occasionally there will be a high pitched whine, but not every time. Plugging the HDMI cable into the motherboard port gives me the screen as it would be without the graphics card.
Asking my pc to restart/reboot from the windows menu, does not start the graphics card, the system has to power off and then restart to get the graphics card up and running again.
I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the nvidia video drivers with DDU, that didn't fix it.
I have updated my BIOS using the usb stick method, that didn't fix it.
I have tried underclocking the GTX 970, that didn't fix it.
I have tried removing and reinstalling the GTX 970, that didn't fix it. And I saw no physical damage on visual inspection of my graphics card.
I did a GPU stress test with furmark, that didn't crash my system after 30 minutes, and my GPU temperature never rose above 63*C.
MSI Kombustor also can't raise my GPU temperature above 63*C, but will black screen/crash the graphics card 9 times out of 10. Sometimes after 15-20 seconds, sometimes it can take over a minute or several minutes, and only once did the Kombustor run for close to 20 minutes without crashing my card.
I can not recall having any other visual glitches on my screen, just the graphics card stops working suddenly and randomly.
After looking though other peoples posts I thought it might be the PSU that's failing. I still have my old graphics card so I removed the GTX 970 and installed my old MSI Geforce GTX 760, it doesn't crash at all. I have stress tested it, played games on high and ultra settings etc. The fan sounds very loud, but it doesn't crash like the GTX 970.
According to PCPartPicker the GTX 760 actually consumes more power at a baseline than my GTX 970. I saw that some people claims that the GTX 970 can suddenly have surges where it consumes a lot of power, but everyone I saw that had that problem had a Evga GTX 970 not a Twin Frozr V.
So now I'm very confused.
I am pretty new to the whole building a pc and making everything work, so I really hope somebody can help me.
MSI Z87I
Intel LGA1150 i5 4670k
Crucial DDR3 BallistiX Sport 16GB
Windows 7
Cooler Master G500
MSI Geforce GTX970 "Twin Frozr V" 4GB
Kingston HyperX SSD
WD Green SATA (as a storage/secondary hard disk drive)
Basic fan cooling.
Back in June of this year (2015) I upgraded my pc, with the above mentioned GTX 970 and the two new RAM sticks. The pc works just fine through all of July and August, then last week I go on vacation. I come back turn on the pc (which has not been touched at all while I was gone) and the pc starts randomly crashing. This has been going on all week. Usually the pc crashes while in an intensive game, or while stressing the computer, but it also sometimes crashes when I am doing nothing more than watching a single video on youtube. The crashes can happen every few minutes, or there can be hours between every crash.
The crashes can happen regardless of the temperature of the graphics card, but usually happen after the graphics card climbs above 60*C (when I'm stressing it in other words).
I don't overclock my card.
The only thing I know I did with the computer the day after coming back from vacation was installing the newest driver update from nvidia. There was also some pretty bad rain storms the week I was away, but my neighbors can not recall that there were any thunder and lightning storms that week. The power did not go out while I was gone, as my digital clock was fine when I got back and it resets to 00.00 when it looses power.
After a lot of testing I have discovered what happens, but not how or what is responsible for it.
The screen goes black, and the monitor displays no signal. I have tried with both a DVI cable and a HDMI cable, so it's not the cable. Then the pc reboots automatically, but the graphics card is not part of the reboot. The fans on the graphics card stop running, it's like it lost power. Occasionally there will be a high pitched whine, but not every time. Plugging the HDMI cable into the motherboard port gives me the screen as it would be without the graphics card.
Asking my pc to restart/reboot from the windows menu, does not start the graphics card, the system has to power off and then restart to get the graphics card up and running again.
I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the nvidia video drivers with DDU, that didn't fix it.
I have updated my BIOS using the usb stick method, that didn't fix it.
I have tried underclocking the GTX 970, that didn't fix it.
I have tried removing and reinstalling the GTX 970, that didn't fix it. And I saw no physical damage on visual inspection of my graphics card.
I did a GPU stress test with furmark, that didn't crash my system after 30 minutes, and my GPU temperature never rose above 63*C.
MSI Kombustor also can't raise my GPU temperature above 63*C, but will black screen/crash the graphics card 9 times out of 10. Sometimes after 15-20 seconds, sometimes it can take over a minute or several minutes, and only once did the Kombustor run for close to 20 minutes without crashing my card.
I can not recall having any other visual glitches on my screen, just the graphics card stops working suddenly and randomly.
After looking though other peoples posts I thought it might be the PSU that's failing. I still have my old graphics card so I removed the GTX 970 and installed my old MSI Geforce GTX 760, it doesn't crash at all. I have stress tested it, played games on high and ultra settings etc. The fan sounds very loud, but it doesn't crash like the GTX 970.
According to PCPartPicker the GTX 760 actually consumes more power at a baseline than my GTX 970. I saw that some people claims that the GTX 970 can suddenly have surges where it consumes a lot of power, but everyone I saw that had that problem had a Evga GTX 970 not a Twin Frozr V.
So now I'm very confused.
I am pretty new to the whole building a pc and making everything work, so I really hope somebody can help me.
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