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Solved Issue with PC crashing and Hardware stopping

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Hi there,

The issue I am having has been ongoing for a few months now, I have the intention of replacing my PC in the near future so haven't addressed it yet, however the issue has recently become worse and is rendering the PC hardly useable with any kind of reliability.

The issue began with my PC 'crashing', this would involve the screen turning black and any audio that was playing would stop a few seconds after, this would require a hard restart via the power button but never led to any issues rebooting the PC afterwards. This issue was sporadic and had some odd tendencies, for example I play many different games on my PC but it would rarely (maybe 2 of the 50ish total 'crashes') happen whilst I was playing any game that required full use of the monitor to play (Valorant, League of Legends, Path of Exile are some examples), however it was far more common of an occurrence whilst I was watching media content (Netflix, Youtube ect.).

The initial issue described above persisted for around 6 months with the frequency of occurrence varying massively, some days it would happen 4/5 times and at other times it would not happen at all for multiple weeks. The problems worsened yesterday when my PC out of nowhere instantly 'shut down' but without the power to the machine turning off. The screen goes instantly black, sound instantly stops and the internal hardware of my PC stops running instantly (i assume everything as there is no sound from the PC at all when the happens), however the power button remains lit as if the PC was still running but attempting to manually power the PC off via the button does not seem to work. To reboot the PC I have to unplug it from the mains, wait for the residual power to stop lighting the power button, plug it back in and power the PC on again. The first time this issue happened and I rebooted, I was greeted with a BIOS corruption page which informed me it was going to use my Backup BIOS and would boot as normal shortly, which it did and this BIOS page has not shown again since even when the issue reoccurred.

Prior to this issue happening I tried to ensure that nothing software based was causing my issues and tried to remove anything from my PC that was not required, this meant my SSD was less full (It was close to it's 256GB capacity prior to this) and I also kept up to date with any driver updates, windows updates and ran regular anti-virus and PC Health checks ect, It seemed to help with the initial issue of the blackscreen 'crash', however as I stated above the initial issue was very sporadic and inconsistent so this may not have been the case. Since the issue occurred which was in my eyes far more severe I completely reset my PC including wiping all personal files and reinstalled windows, this was a rudimentary attempt of diagnostic to find out if the issue was with Hardware or not (hence my posting in the hardware thread). As you probably gather the issue occurred again today after this reset, and I am therefore at a loss as to what the actual issue is, the only other thing I thought to check was PC internal temperatures, these were monitored over a few hours some of this time was spent at low stress (watching videos) and the rest under the stress of running World of Warcraft, the temperatures seemed fine with the low stress being around the 55-60 Celsius mark and the 'stress' periods moving between 65-80 Celsius, which as far as I could tell from looking into it are not 'dangerous' temperate by any means.

I am very much out of my comfort zone with this as I know little to nothing about the workings of a PC so any help or insight into what the issue may be would be greatly appreciated, I will post my PC specifications below and will check for responses regularly should anyone willing to help need any further information.

Thanks in advance,

Richard.

PC Specifications:

CPU:
AMD FX 6300 Black Edition

CPU Cooler:
BeQuiet! Pure Rock

RAM:
16GB Corsair 1600mhz Vengeance (2x8GB)

Graphics card:
AMD Radeon R9 380 4GB

Motherboard:
Gigabyte 970A-DS3P

Operating System:
Windows 10 Home (64-bit)

Hard Drive:
Samsung SSD 850 EVO (250GB)
Seagate 1TB (Hybrid 8GB SSD)

PSU:
550W Corsair VS

Internet:
Wireless 802.11N 300Mbps MIMO PCI-E card

Sound Card:
Creative SoundBlaster Audigy FX PCI-E
 
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In work atm but will take a look when I finish in a couple of hours UK time.

Quick suggestion for you, change the Windows Power Plan to High Performance, the dedicated GPU will be underpowered and performance will suffer.
 
Can I ask that you do not quote every reply as we have to read the full post to make sure nothing gets missed,, thanks.

PSU:
550W Corsair VS

How old is the PSU and what colour is the information label on it.

The issue began with my PC 'crashing', this would involve the screen turning black and any audio that was playing would stop a few seconds

See my canned info below;

Software such as Windows can crash and when it does crash you get a BSOD and when enabled a crash dmp is generated, programs or games when they crash can on occasion close to the desktop but the computer will still be 100% functional.

Hardware failure such as a weak power supply and/or overheating are not software related and when a computer for example suddenly turns off, freezes or the screen goes black etc the behaviour should be described as the "computer shut down unexpectedly" or froze etc and not as having crashed as the latter implies a software issue as opposed to an obvious hardware issue when described properly.

Having the correct info means that helpers will not be looking for a software issue when the problem is clearly hardware related.
 
Apologies if I am replying incorrectly, the whole system was ordered in early February 2016 so I would hazard a rough estimate that it has been in use from mid Feb 2016 and has been used pretty much daily from then.

With regards to the sticker, due to my poor choice of case for the PC when I purchased it only the top of the case comes open to allow access to the hardware, therefore without removing components I am unable to see the label currently. If this is required for any further assistance I understand and will have to take it to a repair shop as I am not comfortable removing hardware with my lack of knowledge.

Thank you for the clarification on the crashing vs unexpected shutdown, I will be sure to use them accurately from now on.
 
No worries but as you can imagine we have to get through a lot of threads and so can do without reading information that is not relevant.

The PSU is a problem as it should never ever have been used in a computer that has an add on video card, Corsair do make good PSUs but they must be used for their intended purpose and when a mid or high end GPU is involved a minimum of a Gold efficiency rated PSU must 100% be used, VS = Value Series and based on the age of your PSU it appears to be the one with an orange label and that was rated as Tier E • Potentially dangerous in multiple scenarios when independently tested here
 
Okay, thanks for the information, sounds like that is likely a part of, if not the whole problem so I will let somebody look at it and replace the PSU either way.

Appreciate you help with this.

All the best.
 
Consider the PSU like you would a human heart, weak and/or an unstable supply = serious problems and the GPU being the most power hungry device tends to suffer first and the most.

Now we know that the PSU is suspect I strongly advise you to revert the Windows Power Plan back to Balanced so as to lighten the load on the PSU.

You are welcome btw :)
 
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These two commands will set the Windows Power Plan back to Balanced and also disable hibernation.

Copy and paste each command into elevated command prompt one at a time and hit enter after each. The first command will put power plan back to balanced and the second will disable hibernation, second is optional...

powercfg.exe /setactive 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e
powercfg -hibernate off

Or hit the windows key and r at the same time, and copy and paste each command and hit ok.
 
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