New PC goes to 'sleep' while gaming. Can it be the PSU?

[Ruorick]

Hi everyone,

 

First time here on the LTT forums, and I am not sure if this is right thread for this, please advise if I can look anywhere else. Recently a friend of mine had a new computer assembled on a budget, but the problem he is facing is that his rig switches into a forced 'sleep' or 'power saving' mode (message the screen displays) during random intervals while gaming, forcing him to do a hard reset. The main game in question is good 'ol Skyrim Legendary Edition (oldrim), modded with the newest 'Ultimate Skyrim' modpack. While I know mods can cause all sorts of issues, he also tested it on old-school mmo's like Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord Of the Rings Online, to the same effect. 

 

I'm no expert in debugging these sorts of things, and my gut initially told me this looks like a power issue, so I ran OCCT to try and see if anything there can trigger the same behaviour, and as soon as I run the Power test, the rig immediately kicked into this 'power save' mode. After this I tried various windows power settings to try and draw less power, like 90% max processor state, as well as disabling the CPU's boost in the BIOS (I did this because my own i7 4790K caused my system to reboot once it kick into a higher frequency, and disabling this helped in my case), but we're still getting the same result.

 

PC Specs are as follows:

 

CPU: Ryzen 5 3400G for the built-in GPU.

Motherboard: GA-A520-DS3H

RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200MHz

SSD: Corsair Force Series MP510 240GB M.2 SSD

PSU: Cooler Master MWE 550W ATX PSU; 80+ White rated.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

[boggy77]

firstly, that cpu is not supported by that motherboard. i am very surprised it even boots to bios. this is most likely to be the issue here.

 

the power saving message is probably the monitor's own message of receiving no signal so it just goes to sleep.

this means the pc is suddenly shutting down. this can indeed indicate an issue with the power supply, especially if it was tested.

try to see if a different power supply works with the system

i'd also try to rule out any ram instability. make sure ram is in slots 2 and 4 and try booting with xmp disabled, just in case xmp is not stable.

 

[Ruorick]

Thanks Boggy,

 

We were completely unaware of the incompatibility between the CPU and Motherboard. It does boot and runs fine except for the gaming. I sincerely hope this is the root cause, we'll see if the supplier can at all agree to an exchange. Sadly we have no access to any other PSU to test, and we will try the XMP profiles for what it is worth. Thanks for pointing this all out.

[akio123008]

3 hours ago, Ruorick said:

forced 'sleep' or 'power saving' mode (message the screen displays

Is that a windows prompt or a no signal warning from the monitor?

[KicksterTech]

The CPU is Incompatible with the Motherboard. You might wanna swap out the chip and find a Compatible one. The power supply could always be changed and see how that goes, Try doing experiments with the PSU to see what happens and go into Battery in windows settings and make sure everything is on Default And any Performance or "High Performance" Setting.

[OrionFOTL]

4 hours ago, Ruorick said:

the problem he is facing is that his rig switches into a forced 'sleep' or 'power saving' mode (message the screen displays)

Just so you know, that message doesn't come from the computer, and doesn't mean the computer went into sleep or power saving mode.

That message comes from the monitor itself, and it means the monitor stopped receiving any input and thus enters power saving mode.

[akio123008]

6 minutes ago, OrionFOTL said:

Just so you know, that message doesn't come from the computer, and doesn't mean the computer went into sleep or power saving mode.

That message comes from the monitor itself, and it means the monitor stopped receiving any input and thus enters power saving mode.

Well that's not confirmed at this point. I suspect the same but there's no way to be sure, the OP wasn't very clear about this.

[Ruorick]

I can confirm that's what he sees happening, that it is the monitor's own 'no signal' message my friend is seeing. I was only loosely using the terms 'sleep' and 'power saving' mode just to describe what he saw, not knowing exactly what was happening (I was never present when it happened, this is what my friend has been reporting to me). Apologies for not stating it more clearly at first. He did now tell me that the case fans are still going when this happens, so it does not shut down completely, but loses signal. When I ran the OCCT power test via Teamviewer, it kicked me out immediately. 

[akio123008]

I don't think the power supply is the issue here, when the power supply is the problem the computer usually reboots itself, whereas in this case the system is still running and has to be manually reset by the user.

 

That CPU is suspicious indeed but it might as well be the graphics card or something else, that's hard to tell. I'm quite confident it's not the PSU though.

[Ruorick]

Yes he is using the CPU for the APU in order to at least enjoy a few games on a budget, so no dedicated GPU. He's now taking the PC to the supplier some time to have a look at it and possibly get the BIOS updated to see if anything improves after running diagnostics again, or if they can arrange to exhange the Motherboard if it is indeed what's causing this. 

[Ruorick]

Update: Having swopped to a B450M Motherboard it seemed to have done the trick. Thanks guys for the pointers.