PC freezing with new GPU

[Daventh]

The PC seems to run fine without the GPU installed, but when it is installed it can run games for some time before completely freezing up, also performance increases but not by much, the time it takes for the system to freeze depends on how demanding the game is, happens with the latest drivers installed, the case is a no-name brand, has no fans, its a small case for a Micro-ATX motherboard, in case the culprit is heat causing the APU to freeze (as I suspect).

System Specs:
CPU: AMD APU A8-7600
CPU Cooler: Stock cooler.
Motherboard: Gigabyte F2A68HM-H
RAM 8GB DDR3 (2x4GB)
GPU: Asus RX 470 4GB Mining
PSU: Aerocool Cylon 500W Full Range 80+ Bronze
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64bits
 

[Nord]

Heat most likely, yes.

If you have no intake or exhaust fans at all, all you do is recycle the air your system has inside. Which ends up in very hot components, very quickly. Including passively cooled components such as mobo chipset, VRMS, RAM and the PSU (if it is a top mounted one).

I would just take a 25cm+ sized desk fan or something, open up the case and let the desk fan blow fullblast into the system from an angle. If that fixes it, you know for sure its heat and need to invest in case fans. (which you honestly should do either way, even cheap 5-10$ ones are better than none)

Alternatively, using HWInfo64 or HwMonitor, you could check with and without the GPU installed how hot the systin & cputin gets as well as monitoring CPU / GPU temperature and cross reference those.

[Daventh]

thanks for your answer, will try out the big fan test, I read online that HWinfo is not very reliable when reading APUs temps, so I used AMD OverDrive instead which shows the delta to max temperature, when gaming the CPU would reach around 5°C from max and probably hit 0 when freezes but i got no way to be sure, without the GPU installed it would sit around 14-11°C from max, but it still is weird to me that it hard freezes instead of throttling or just crashing the game.

[Nord]

So far it continues to point toward overheating.

The reason the system freezes could easily be that the throttling is so hard that the minimum requirements for the running application(s) is not met anymore and the software basically does not know how to respond and locks up everything.

Another option would be that the additional heat the GPU produces simply makes passively cooled parts overheat. You kinda have to imagine if installing the GPU already makes the CPU go 10°C~ hotter - which is an actively cooled part - how much the temperature in the case itself rises…
Thing is, it's not only the GPU that produces additional heat now, it's also the PSU getting warmer as it has to let more electricity through to feed the GPU.

There would still be the option to log the entire behavior with, for example, Hwinfo64 or afterburner but I don't know how accurate these are if/once a freeze occurs.
Would be somewhat interesting to not only log temperatures but also coreclocks, for science and stuff.

[Daventh]

Yes the next step is to check the CPU and GPU behaviour with msi afterburner to see clocks, usage, temps, i also read that since its a mining card it can do some weird stuff under these kind of conditions. But since its a friend's PC, we havent gotten around to getting a better cooling yet, will update our findings once we test it. But I keep thinking its heat, with the side panel off it didn't freeze but the game (Monster Hunter World) ran extremely poorly, Skyrim's performance improved as well frame times, I asume it was able to throttle very hard with that extra airflow.

[Daventh]

On 9/6/2019 at 6:29 PM, Nord said:

So far it continues to point toward overheating.

The reason the system freezes could easily be that the throttling is so hard that the minimum requirements for the running application(s) is not met anymore and the software basically does not know how to respond and locks up everything.

Another option would be that the additional heat the GPU produces simply makes passively cooled parts overheat. You kinda have to imagine if installing the GPU already makes the CPU go 10°C~ hotter - which is an actively cooled part - how much the temperature in the case itself rises…
Thing is, it's not only the GPU that produces additional heat now, it's also the PSU getting warmer as it has to let more electricity through to feed the GPU.

There would still be the option to log the entire behavior with, for example, Hwinfo64 or afterburner but I don't know how accurate these are if/once a freeze occurs.
Would be somewhat interesting to not only log temperatures but also coreclocks, for science and stuff.

Sorry it took a while, took a big fan (around 25cm in diameter) and pointed it at an angle at the components with the side panel off, temps seemed to be fine at around 40°C in both CPU and GPU I checked with AMD Overdrive and MSI Afterburner, also no freezes, got a random BSoD while playing Dark Souls 3 but I was not able to replicate it and performance on that game was greatly improved, to around 60 fps from 15 without the fan, it would take a few minutes for the fps to increase though.

Monster Hunter World on the other hand... it would not completely freeze the PC, it would get a single freeze for a few seconds and then run normally again, thing is, performance with or without fan or without the GPU was pretty much the same at around 20 fps with stuttering, even tried with an R9 380 2GB and a different power supply, an EVGA SuperNova NEX 750W Gold, performance would not improve but at least would not freeze, however, a while back i watched a gameplay of Monster Hunter with the same CPU on a 570 and a 1050Ti and in said video it would run at around 40fps, and even if it did not run at like that on this system, I don't quite understand why having a GPU doesn't have an effect on performance.

[Nord]

Well, that's no conclusive outcome than, in fact, the situation is even more confusing now and I’m rather close to simply suggest a fresh windows installation, as it kinda sounds like a software problem now…

… Unless and I don't think this is even possible +I need to point out that I didn't have an AMD system in front of me in the past 10+ years, but could it be that the games use the amd apu for whatever reason?
Or do you, by any chance, plug your monitor into the motherboard IO instead of the GPU...?

[Daventh]

Hard to tell if it's Windows but it wouldn't hurt to try given that Windows 7 is going out soon anyway, might as well update to Windows 10; Well the GPU had increased usage during the play session so I guess it was being used, also Monster Hunter has a VRAM usage meter that changed depending on the GPU installed, And no, the monitor was plugged into the GPU.

[Daventh]

On 9/24/2019 at 5:12 PM, Nord said:

Well, that's no conclusive outcome than, in fact, the situation is even more confusing now and I’m rather close to simply suggest a fresh windows installation, as it kinda sounds like a software problem now…

… Unless and I don't think this is even possible +I need to point out that I didn't have an AMD system in front of me in the past 10+ years, but could it be that the games use the amd apu for whatever reason?
Or do you, by any chance, plug your monitor into the motherboard IO instead of the GPU...?

Well, what seems to have fixed the freezing was buying a mid-tower case with 4 case fans pre-installed + another fan he bought, connected through MOLEX so I guess they run at 100% all the time and temps are much more reasonable now, but what improved the performance drastically was installing Windows 10, now instead of playing at around 20-30 fps, the games run close to or at 60 and without stuttering, even Monster Hunter, so I guess it was Windows after all.