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First, I’d like to express my deep apologies to all who missed the punk event yesterday due to my absence and not getting invites to the session as a consequence.
And many many thanks everyone for helping out yesterday and giving me some pointers, especially gloozy for taking over the practical organisation at zero notice, and nop, jeffrey, madred, and others, for giving me some tips on what might be the causes and how I might fix them. I really appreciate this.
So I opened my case this morning, cleaned a bit of dust (wasn’t much), and managed to move my GPU back into the proper 16x PCIe slot by moving my SSD forward (it was in the 8x slot, some of you may remember!). Sadly this didn’t fix the stability problem, but I can now reliably reproduce it with furmark: it always happens when my card is drawing 100% power. It doesn’t happen when it’s voltage limited (like when graphics settings are high and fps is only around 45). This explains why I get crashes usually when joining online: during the “clouds” scene in GTA, I suspect that my card is not voltage limited.
So most likely it’s a PSU problem. Although it is 750W (which should be more than enough, I did the calculations and should be able to get by with just 500W, of course a bit of head room never hurts), it’s a cheap unrated supply that came with the build. Could be a blown transistor somewhere inside the unit.
New high quality PSU (EVGA 650 W G2 GOLD 80+) on its way, should arrive in the next few days. Fortunately I can still use my machine for everything except the normal gaming. I will try play at low resolution and low settings, maybe that would work, we’ll see.
1) you answered on your own by: “it’s a cheap unrated supply that came with the build”
2) gfx cant be limited on power cos it already worked in past 😀Many thanks 83 and gloozy!
For the time being I manage to run GTA without random reboots by fixing vsync to “adaptive (half refresh rate)” in the nvidia control panel. In-game isn’t enough – it doesn’t lock the fps during the online loading screen. Also running at minimal settings. This keeps the power draw of my card around 35% according to furmark, low enough to prevent the PSU to go AWOL, or at least so is the theory. The good news is that I should be able to play this week until the new PSU arrives, albeit only at 30 fps, so not great, but playable.
btw are you sure that the problem cant be in your graphic card? i mean overheating or something like that…
Pretty sure. I’ve replicated it right after cold startup with card temperature as low as 45 centigrade, and temperature of card never goes above 65 centigrade. It consistently happens when the card is at 100% power draw for a few seconds.
Anyway I’m about to find out if it is the power supply because the new one just arrived. Wish me luck!
Thanks for crossing your fingers everyone, it worked!!! So far no more crashes, not in-game, and not under stress testing either. Here’s a snapshot of the new layout inside the case:
Thanks 83. I agree that it would be nicer to hide the cables a bit more. Where would you hide those cables? The power cables to the CPU and to the motherboard, as well as the power cables to the DVD and to the SSD (the latter sitting in the top HDD box), are already nicely hidden behind the panel behind the motherboard as you probably already noticed. Unfortunately, the bottom two HDD boxes are used (the picture does not show the bottom one, but you can see the red SATA cable running down to it), so I cannot tuck the cables in there. Otherwise that would be the perfect spot.
The only problem I see in your computer case is the “stock fan” that came in with your CPU. Even if you are not overclocking, cpu heating is a problem. Also that powersupp doesnt look like cheap stuff either. EVGA makes graphics cards. They wouldn’t mess around with a bad PSU around their GPUs I think. I could be wrong of course xD
Here’s how my cpu cooler looks like right now. Its a friggin monstrosity and takes up more space than my graphics card lol. But I like the custom ugly ass looks of it. The operative word here is “functional” though 😀
I hope you find out the cause of the problems in your system Mattie.
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