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As the title says, my PC is constantly crashing lately and I have no idea why.
What I DO know, is that it only crashes when I'm playing games, usually TF2 or Magic 2014.
What happens is that I'll be in a game and suddenly either A) The game just flat out freezes and I have to force-shut down my PC, or B) The screen blacks out, all audio stops and my monitor gives me a "No Signal Detected!" message. It never BSOD's, and I can't save a minidump of the happenings for some reason.
Can anyone help me figure out what's going on? From what I've researched, it might be due to overheating, but the tower always feels fine and I just cleaned out my fans and dusted it all out three times. Feel free to ask more about it if you think it'll help, I just really want to get it running properly again.
Oh, and I'm not sure of this is related, but I have my CPU power set at 1400 MHz - 3400 MHz, my processor is AMD A10-5800K APU with Radeon HD Graphics 3.80 GHz, I have 8 Gigs of Ram with 7.71 usable, and my operating system is 64 bit.
I know this probably isn't the best place to post this, I just figured I'd see if anyone else has had this problem and knew a solution.
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Generally, overheating results in the entire system powering off, not just blacking out, so I don't think that's your problem. My gut reaction is that this is graphics driver related. Make sure you have the latest driver installed for your card and if you do already, I uninstall it (and the Catalyst Control Center software), re download from ATI (AMD now?), restart, and reinstall.
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I had that problem exactly when my graphics card was giving its final hurrah before dying.
I recommend first making sure it's well cooled (physically [heat paste-thing] and/or through ventilation), then looking into a new graphics card if that does nothing.
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Do you have scanners on your computer? Run them one at a time after the computer is cooled off.
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Get some monitoring software to check the temperatures on your CPU and GPU. You might already have software from the hardware vendor that does that. I use CoreTemp and GPU-Z, but there are a lot of options out there.
Start them up, start a game, play for a while, and see how much your temps climb. If you get over 70°C, you've probably got a cooling problem. If you get over 90°C, you've definitely got a cooling problem, and shouldn't run your computer until you fix it, or you risk burning up components.
If the readings are stable around 50°C, you may still have a cooling problem that the sensors don't cover (usually the memory on the graphics card), but it's more likely failing hardware or a driver issue. Have you looked at the Windows Event Log (Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer) for any errors?
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As others have said, it's possible it's either over heating, or when this actually occurred to me, you have a weak power supply for the requirements of your hardware.
Whenever I ran higher-end games, with heavy graphics intensity, and my graphics card demanded more power, it just blacked out, and I think I had to flip the power switch off and on again to restart.
My advice is to first try and cool your computer better, since doing so can only be beneficial.
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Hey guys, sorry to keep you in the dark so long, I was gonna update this but then the forums were down and I got kinda lazy, so here's what happened. Or, at least, what I believed happened.
It was a hardware problem, but it wasn't due to overheating, at least not entirely.
I was trying everything I could and re installed my drivers a couple of times, but it just kept crashing after ten minutes of any game. Finally I decided that, if nothing else, I should just open my PC up and dust it out to see if that might do anything.
Keep in mind that I'm really not the most technically inclined, so this was the first time in over a year of owning this beauty of a PC that I've opened it up, so there was a crap load of dust on everything. Me and a buddy opened everything up, dusted it all out really well with some compressed air canisters, and closed it up afterwards to see if it helped anything. Right as I was plugging the monitor cable back in, I remembered a while back how the monitor cord was lopsided on one side, so I looked at it and there was a screw on one end of the cord itself that was supposed to be attached to the video card.
I opened up the case again and sure enough, the metal pane that half of the monitor cable is supposed to attach to was really bent backwards, so I bent it back and screwed it all on like it's supposed to be, and I haven't experienced any issues since.
TL;DR Couldn't fix it, opened PC and the video card had a bent pane.
In related news, I am not the father.
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