Whats up,
First of all, my specs:
* i5 4570
* Gigabyte GTX970 mITX
* Corsair HX650W 80+ Bronze PSU (OLD. 6+ years)
* Gigabyte B85M-D3H
* Vengeance 8GB Ram
* 1TB Seagate HDD, 128GB Samsung Evo SSD
So the problem is random display crashes. It mostly happens when I'm playing games. I don't play many, so mainly Dota 2, Mount & Blade, and Skyrim. It has happened while I'm just watching YouTube, but only a few times. The crash happens like this:
- Speakers will go on audio loop/buzz/be silent the exact moment the display will crash to a solid colour. Blue and green seems to be the most common. The solid colour also has vertical lines through it. Basically exactly like this: https://static1.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1545/15454190/2701149-dsc03460.jpg
- Most of the time, it seems to crash my whole computer. Though sometimes my computer seems to still run in the background while the screen crashes. For example, I was in TeamSpeak when I crashed, but I could still talk to my friends. Still, I have to manually restart my PC. Event viewer says nothing.
Under-clocking my card a 150~ MHZ on the core and memory clock seems to reduce crashes. Though still I would have bad days, crashing 3 times, but then go two weeks WITHOUT crashing.
I don't think it's my graphics card. If it is, I'm really unlucky, because my previous graphics card (GTX 770) had the exact same problem. I even sent that 770 back to EVGA for testing, and they said they couldn't find any problems. My graphics card gets to 75c~ max at load, and I don't think the voltages are bad - seems to stay at 1.012V (though honestly I know very little about voltage monitoring). The GPU is firmly in the socket, I even tried running it with the case off and twitching it a bit to see if it is due to it falling out of its socket a bit.
I have also stress tested my GPU for like 15 minutes, and weirdly enough, I have never crashed while stress testing. (Though I have probably only done it for a total of 30 minutes).
My CPU also performed fine on a stress test, though I just found out that I average 95c - 100c under load, so I need to fix that. The heat-sink is set up fine and the fan works, I don't really know the problem - I may have used too much thermal paste when I installed it 2 years ago.
I've done some extensive RAM test (I forgot the program name) and there were no issues. My HDD is new and performing fine so I don't think that's the problem.
For a long time I thought my PSU was the problem, because it's pretty old. (6+ years)
But a friend told me that my crash symptoms (random, display) don't really fit as being a PSU problem.
Other than that it's my motherboard, drivers or my monitor (which I don't think is the problem as it most of the time crashes my whole PC). I have no idea how to check if your motherboard has problems. I may have been a tiny bit rough with it, maybe stretched it a bit (it's not bent though) when installing, but not that bad. I am pretty sure it's not drivers. I have used Display Driver Uninstaller and tried stable nvidia driver versions. I have even formatted my whole HDD a few times during the span of this problem (1.5~ years).
Anyone have any ideas?
First of all, my specs:
* i5 4570
* Gigabyte GTX970 mITX
* Corsair HX650W 80+ Bronze PSU (OLD. 6+ years)
* Gigabyte B85M-D3H
* Vengeance 8GB Ram
* 1TB Seagate HDD, 128GB Samsung Evo SSD
So the problem is random display crashes. It mostly happens when I'm playing games. I don't play many, so mainly Dota 2, Mount & Blade, and Skyrim. It has happened while I'm just watching YouTube, but only a few times. The crash happens like this:
- Speakers will go on audio loop/buzz/be silent the exact moment the display will crash to a solid colour. Blue and green seems to be the most common. The solid colour also has vertical lines through it. Basically exactly like this: https://static1.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1545/15454190/2701149-dsc03460.jpg
- Most of the time, it seems to crash my whole computer. Though sometimes my computer seems to still run in the background while the screen crashes. For example, I was in TeamSpeak when I crashed, but I could still talk to my friends. Still, I have to manually restart my PC. Event viewer says nothing.
Under-clocking my card a 150~ MHZ on the core and memory clock seems to reduce crashes. Though still I would have bad days, crashing 3 times, but then go two weeks WITHOUT crashing.
I don't think it's my graphics card. If it is, I'm really unlucky, because my previous graphics card (GTX 770) had the exact same problem. I even sent that 770 back to EVGA for testing, and they said they couldn't find any problems. My graphics card gets to 75c~ max at load, and I don't think the voltages are bad - seems to stay at 1.012V (though honestly I know very little about voltage monitoring). The GPU is firmly in the socket, I even tried running it with the case off and twitching it a bit to see if it is due to it falling out of its socket a bit.
I have also stress tested my GPU for like 15 minutes, and weirdly enough, I have never crashed while stress testing. (Though I have probably only done it for a total of 30 minutes).
My CPU also performed fine on a stress test, though I just found out that I average 95c - 100c under load, so I need to fix that. The heat-sink is set up fine and the fan works, I don't really know the problem - I may have used too much thermal paste when I installed it 2 years ago.
I've done some extensive RAM test (I forgot the program name) and there were no issues. My HDD is new and performing fine so I don't think that's the problem.
For a long time I thought my PSU was the problem, because it's pretty old. (6+ years)
But a friend told me that my crash symptoms (random, display) don't really fit as being a PSU problem.
Other than that it's my motherboard, drivers or my monitor (which I don't think is the problem as it most of the time crashes my whole PC). I have no idea how to check if your motherboard has problems. I may have been a tiny bit rough with it, maybe stretched it a bit (it's not bent though) when installing, but not that bad. I am pretty sure it's not drivers. I have used Display Driver Uninstaller and tried stable nvidia driver versions. I have even formatted my whole HDD a few times during the span of this problem (1.5~ years).
Anyone have any ideas?