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Started by Luxzin | | 4 answers
Computer issues - need help diagnosing please!
Okay... Lately I've been having a few weird problems when using my computer. At first it was as simple as both of my monitors losing signal when playing full screen games like skyrim, and eventually more serious problems like games crashing during gameplay and occasional pink or green screens where I have to switch my power supply off to get out of it. These problems have been becoming more and more frequent and some new issues have been having in the past few days such as the computer randomly turning off during games and turning off just after logging in to windows. I have also been getting an nvidia kernel driver error of some sort saying it stopped responding and recovered.

The things I have tried so far are...
- Deleting and reinstalling display drivers
- Formatting all disks and reinstalling windows
- Stress test on GPU for over 6 hours with weirdly no issue even though I have issues playing simple games like Minecraft..

I suspect it is either a GPU problem, power supply issue, or even a RAM issue... But I have no clue whatsoever how to diagnose it and have no other parts to swap out and see if everything works fine with a different part. Please help!

Computer specs:
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Luxzin/builds/
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August 27, 2014 8:36:55 PM

Try having your brother smashing a banana into your motherboard or fan. It works. Thank me later! :D 
July 20, 2014 6:35:25 PM

Make sure your graphics card is seated in the motherboard correctly and if everything is connected properly you might want to do basic diagnostics on all your parts except the power supply because if it's the power supply you don't want to stress it. also download a program like gpu-z or CPUID hwmonitor to give you accurate temperatures on all of your computer parts even things like the vrm on your graphics card and your motherboard temperatures

I would normally say it's the GPU but if you've stress tested it, it might not be, but make sure you do a variety of stress tests before you rule it out. this is the gpu stress testing software I use it has many types of tests go ahead and run them all for a while and if there's an issue look up what exactly the test puts stress on. http://www.geeks3d.com/gputest/

I would also do a CPU test because if that has errors funny things can happen. here is a link that one can do cpu, gpu, and psu but don't do the PSU one unless you know your psu isn't defective. http://www.ocbase.com/index.php/download

check and see if your hard drives and ssd's are healthy I used to use a program to test the hard drives but I forgot what it was called but you don't want to stress test an ssd because that will shorten its life.

and last it could be the motherboard, but I dont know how to test that.

And you can try what mbreslin1954 suggested and change out parts if you have them. For me that's what my last resort is when I can't boot, but it can definitely help if there's nothing that you can find through stress tests.
July 20, 2014 5:13:34 PM

mbreslin1954 said:
It sounds like a hardware problem. As you suspect, I think it might be either a PSU or GPU issue. In order to troubleshoot this you will need to have hardware to swap out, typically the only way to tell for sure is to swap out components. I would swap out your PSU with another one. If that doesn't solve the problem, swap out your GPU, those two items seem like the likeliest candidates.

Have you monitored temperatures with something like Speccy from CPUID?

https://www.piriform.com/speccy

If your CPU, motherboard, or video card are running too hot, this will tell you. If none of your equipment is running too hot, then it could be a failing piece of equipment.

I have monitored temps and they are all regular. Nothing out of the ordinary.. I have a 450w power supply that I might swap in and see what happens.. It sounds lame but it's such a headache..
July 20, 2014 4:51:28 PM

It sounds like a hardware problem. As you suspect, I think it might be either a PSU or GPU issue. In order to troubleshoot this you will need to have hardware to swap out, typically the only way to tell for sure is to swap out components. I would swap out your PSU with another one. If that doesn't solve the problem, swap out your GPU, those two items seem like the likeliest candidates.

Have you monitored temperatures with something like Speccy from CPUID?

https://www.piriform.com/speccy

If your CPU, motherboard, or video card are running too hot, this will tell you. If none of your equipment is running too hot, then it could be a failing piece of equipment.

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