PC unresponsive during games, monitor shuts down but sound continues until PC is manually shutdown

thigor

Honorable
Feb 6, 2014
5
0
10,510
Hey guys I've been having a pretty serious issue with my system as of late, my PC freezes up when I'm playing video games (LoL / Titanfall / WoW)becoming totally unresponsive but the sound continues. I can even continue speaking on skype during the crash, then the monitor shuts down but the tower continues to be powered on until I am forced to shut it down manually.

Sometimes I can also get blue screens stating that the display driver took too long to respond or a pop up on reboot from the control center saying the PC was shut down due to a display driver not responding but has no recovered.

My card temperature is always good around 35c idle and 50 under load.

I have tried a few things so far, I've cleaned the dust from inside the case, I've tried increasing the delay on the GPU timeout detection, I've re installed directX and downloaded the latest display drivers.

My PC specs are:

Processor: i5-2500k @ 3.3GHz
RAM: 4GB
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6950
PSU: 550W
Mobo: Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

I've read around a bit but am stumped on what to do now, I tried to downclock my processor from 4.4GHz through the bios but I'm still getting problems.

The problem is very sporadic, I played for almost a full week without a single problem last week then I was away for a few days visiting friends, I come back and it froze up twice within half an hour. I installed a windows update and it worked well for the rest of the day, now today I boot up and its crashed about 7 times already. Once was playing WoW, then I had to go through startup repair for 15 mins to boot windows, then the pc crashed again loadng up chrome. Then its just been on and off crashing, its remained stable for the last hour now though.

Would appreciate any advice or possible solutions to help rectify this, I'm hoping its a software issue rather than a hardware issue. Thanks in advance!
 
on the gpu use msi afterburner try downclocking the gpu and turning up the gpu fan to see if it heat issue with the gpu.
on your power supply try another unit for testing see if the other unit is not holding. use volt meter and look at the voltage outputs when gaming.
 

thigor

Honorable
Feb 6, 2014
5
0
10,510
Thanks for the reply, I've turned the fans up to around 60% from 45% as a test for now.

Unfortunately I don't have another PSU unit to test nor a voltmeter to test the voltage, my hardware knowledge isn't exactly top notch to be honest!
 
First I turn off any OCing.
2nd according to here http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/amd-radeon-hd-6000/hd-6950/pages/amd-radeon-hd-6950-overview.aspx#3 your using 50W more than the minimal PSU, so potentially if this is a cheapo PSU )(numerous articles on this) it actually could be running at 450W or 475W, and when under load (gaming) it fails. So yea, I would look to get a reputable PSU (agaion several articles on Reliable PSU) around 600W to be ont he safe side ($99 on PC Parts Picker) and swap it out.

Other things to help us more:

Yeah know what you said but better when we can see actual numbers sometimes then 'ranges' we are "sure" we get, may not be the total accuracy.
Download and run SPECCY, copy and paste the first tab to show your idle temps?
Download and run MSI Afterburner, run some of the games that crash, what temps are you getting when underload?

Sometimes you may have malicious stuff in the background hammering a system which can as well cause issues.
Remove whatever AV your using and go to www.filehippo.com and download AVAST! or AVG and do a full system scan - this repeatedly has resolved alot of people issue relying on MS Essentials.

Download Malwarebytes do a full system scan (AV doesn't pick up alot of malware) - this resolved almost ALL other similiar posts to date as most had Malware the AV didn't pick up.

Repeat the AV/Malware scans till the system comes up clean.

Turn off any OverClocking (OC) and see if this helps, maybe someone 'thought a little more' was good but now causes the instability.


New patched and fixes come out all the time, even after a great 'build', so
Did you install all Windows Updates? Including options except BING? Check them and repeat till ALL are installed.
Download and run Slim Drivers, install all the latest updates but you don't need to reboot until you do the last update
Check the Mobo maker's website and see if there is a BIOS update that may also address this.


Let us know each result please