PC shuts down in mid game. Psu?

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spaceman

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I was playing bf3 and twice tonight my pc has just shut down. No bsod or anything, just blanks out like the power went out in the house. Except it is just the pc doing it. I moved it around a bit and something might be loose. However, what does it usually mean when the entire pc blanks out like this? PSU is a month old corsair GS800 and I am not pushing it hard at all.
 
Maybe. A good start would be full system specs so we might be able to help you out. PSU is a likely culprit if it is doing as you described though.
 
Something is overheating, probably your CPU or GPU. You should download a GPU/CPU monitor and check your temps. I recommend MSI Afterburner.
 
nah i dont think it's overheating, but of course doesn't hurt to check, sounds like the power draw is too high on the power supply and the overload protection kicks in and shuts down the pc
 
Mine does this as well.. and I know the temps aren't that high. CPU @ 52C according to CoreTemp and GPU anywhere from 65-70 in MSI Afterburner. Rig and overclock in sig. Now that I see someone else's PC is doing the same thing, I may look into getting another PSU.

I have another set of PCI-e connectors, would changing them make a difference? I assume the other set of connectors are on a different rail.
 
power supply issue, or temp related.

for temp checking I use hardware monitor or openhardware monitor(open is well opensource :p) can leave them run in background, it willt ell you highest temp it has hit this way.

Also, depending on your GPU(though I doubt it) the clocks might be to high for it, if the power tune limit is not set to +20 it can throttle/shutdown, OBVIOUSLY this depends on if you are using a gpu that has power tune i.e a Radeon.

I think its probably the psu not able to keep up with the power draw, GS series are not thier high end brand, but it is an 800 watt power supply, speced for 65a on the 12v, so unless you are massively overclocking/loading, this may not be the issue, and could be a temp/voltage related issue.
 
good point, if the power supply in question is drawing to much a off the one 12v rail, then yes it can help, after all they are supposed to have OVP/over current protection on the rails, so this might help.

However in regards to OP, he does not have that option, as its a single rail unit.
 
hmmmmmm - OP, do you have another PSU to try out? Definitely interested in what's causing this problem.
 
spaceman said:
I was playing bf3 and twice tonight my pc has just shut down. No bsod or anything, just blanks out like the power went out in the house. Except it is just the pc doing it. I moved it around a bit and something might be loose. However, what does it usually mean when the entire pc blanks out like this? PSU is a month old corsair GS800 and I am not pushing it hard at all.
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This happened to me back in the push pin days of intel CPU coolers. What is happening is the CPU or GPU has reached its terminal temperature. A predefine temperature that will shutdown if that threshold is reached. So you might need to reapply TIM on the CPU or GPU or you got some major dust bunnies all over the cooler.
 
Are you overclocking any of your components?

It sounds like your voltage (probably vcore) is too low.
 
Vcore for cpu or the clocks are to high with powertune and voltages to low for gpu to support its clocks, though for both this usually results in a blue screen

Do you have the blue screening ability turned on, if not, turn it on, this might be why you are not seeing this screen, instead it just immediate reboots.

Also, if you are using one of the new Intel chips, set it to XMP for the memory, my buddy was having the 100% same problem you describe, apprently its something to do with what Intel baked into the cpu, if it reaches certain "safety factors" be it clocks, ram, voltages etc, and it decides its running out of spec its an abrubt and immediate power off, like a snap :O

So settting it to XMP memory side might solve this.
 
2500k at 4ghz, 8gb sys ram Gskill sniper series and a 480 gtx soc at stock right now one hd and one dvd. I will check out the xmp setting. If not, the psu goes back. I want a better psu anyway.
 
I've had that problem in the past with my Radeon 5870. It turned out that the automatic fan control wasn't turning the fan up high enough for certain games. I used Afterburner to manually turn it up in those cases.
 
I think I'm having the same problem with my Radeon 5870 but it's watercooled and the water is flowing in the loop, not hot at all. Twice today it just went to a black screen.

I never had this problem before, but yesterday I turned up the clocks on the 5870 to the max provided on the Catalyst software. The Catalyst software said I was passing the test at those levels. But that's in "performance mode" or whatever they call it, and I was just web browsing so it could not have been in performance mode.

Both times it seemed to be when I was using the mouse wheel fwiw --- almost sure that's irrelevant.

I'm sure it wasn't the PSU because for one thing I could see water rippling in my reservoir, and also the monitor was still receiving an active signal. Monitor did not go to standby. The video card was still sending it a signal, but that signal was all-black.
 
Temps are all normal. The highest either the cpu or gpu hits is 60C.

Turned on XMP and just played 30 minutes of Gulf of Oman with no issues.
 
spaceman said:
Temps are all normal. The highest either the cpu or gpu hits is 60C.

Turned on XMP and just played 30 minutes of Gulf of Oman with no issues.
Click to expand...

Try returning your CPU to stock.

CPU overclocking is responsible for far more crashes than PSU or video card issues. The PSU or video card should be blamed only when crashes occur after the CPU has been set to stock speeds.
 
so the XMP helped then spaceman?

As for the 5870 and the issue, are you using a full cover waterblock or just for the core?

If the memory/vregs get to hot, it can trigger some weird things to happen, though I am not using a stick cooler on my 6870 anymore, I turned th fan % up to 100 and it doesnt seems to mind the overclock now, which is odd, but it is the way it is.

If it happened both times using the mouse wheel, there might be some strange IRQ cross referencing going on, it shouldnt happen, but I have heard of such things before.
 
spaceman said:
I was playing bf3 and twice tonight my pc has just shut down. No bsod or anything, just blanks out like the power went out in the house. Except it is just the pc doing it. I moved it around a bit and something might be loose. However, what does it usually mean when the entire pc blanks out like this? PSU is a month old corsair GS800 and I am not pushing it hard at all.
Click to expand...

Mine did this a few times. The fix was correcting my memory timings in bios (xmp in my case).


edit: I see you've already received this solution :) It's crazy how repeatable this is. When I updated my bios it reverted away from the xmp profile and started crashing.
 
if you had bad memory timings you would get errors and bluescreens, it wouldn't cause your pc to suddenly power off, this doesn't make much sense, but ok
 
it does make sence with the new cpus from Intel, believe me, for us normal people it doesnt, but for Intel and thier fine programming it makes perfect sence :p

Basically, you are asking the IMC to OC to support the higher speed ram, XMP is a profile that tells the cpu "I need you to do higher speeds" at least 5 of my freinds had this issue UNTIL they enabled XMP, then they could do what they wanted, before they hit XMP, as soon as the cpu got loaded it signaled a shut down because technically the cpu is running "out of spec" according to its various fancy controllers.

But hey, you all want to use Intel, you have to suffer things like this.

Lord forbid the sudden power loss kills components, or for that matter screws the SATA based hard drives/SSD.

I dont think it makes any sence either, but hey, at least 8 folks now, that have had this problem, seem to be able to fix it, just by going into the bios and enabling XMP. Course, it would be nice to have a button to turn off the cpu checking for things like this, but that would make to much sence, hell, I have even heard of folks using overclocked GPU on non-overclocked system and it doing the same immediate system crash, untill they ran it full default, or, enabled XMP.

Keep using Intel, they are much faster, and smarter :p
 
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