What causes a random shutdown?

[OnionRings]

I'm talking no warning, not windows restarts or updates, no power outage in house, just a random restart, followed by my login screen on windows.. It happened twice today while I was streaming grounded, temps are fine max I saw was 68.9 with averages below 60, voltages are default I believe but never went above 1.4.

 

Power supply? Pushing CPU too hard? Will a CPU do that? I didn't think they would unless they were overheated or throttling. Not sure how to check anything else. I was using a rather demanding cpu preset on OBS, but again nothing was maxed/overheating/throttling, so I don't know.

 

PC is a few years old, but hopefully nothing is dying on me...

[CommanderAlex]

Hardware failure and/or intermittent loss of power provided.

[OnionRings]

3 minutes ago, CommanderAlex said:

Hardware failure and/or intermittent loss of power provided.

Since this is a new occurrence during a new activity (first time streaming and playing grounded at the same time), could it just be a lack of power to my computer in general? Maybe my PSU is underperforming, never had issues before but again, new activity, how can I try to reperform the tests? Maybe run a CPU and GPU stress at the same time? try 1 at a time first then both together, while monitoring power loads?

[Eigenvektor]

I had this happen to me when I first undervolted my CPU. It would work totally fine, but there were some situations where (presumably) sudden higher power requirement made the PC reboot immediately.

 

Since you're saying your PC is a few years old, it might be the PSU. It might not be able to provide as much power as it used to, or be less able to deal with sudden spikes in power draw.

 

Take a look into the Event Log of Windows, might be there's some error recorded in there that could give a clue.

[OnionRings]

8 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

I had this happen to me when I first undervolted my CPU. It would work totally fine, but there were some situations where (presumably) sudden higher power requirement made the PC reboot immediately.

 

Since you're saying your PC is a few years old, it might be the PSU. It might not be able to provide as much power as it used to, or be less able to deal with sudden spikes in power draw.

 

Take a look into the Event Log of Windows, might be there's some error recorded in there that could give a clue.

will do after work, gonna have to google it as im not sure how to, but hopefully it can tell me if there was an issue.

[Pixelfie]

What PSU do you have? I assume the rest of the specs are the ones in your sign?

 

Try running with XMP off. I've had a few cases where an unstable RAM overclock caused similar issues, and Corsair RAM + Ryzen don't always like each other.

[Eigenvektor]

6 minutes ago, OnionRings said:

will do after work, gonna have to google it as im not sure how to, but hopefully it can tell me if there was an issue.

Opening Event Viewer is pretty simple, just press start and enter "Event Viewer" and you should find it. Then navigate to Windows Logs > System. See if there are any entries with a red exclamation mark. Maybe also check below Applications and Services Logs > Hardware Events. If you click on the entry you should see some (more or less helpful) explanation of the event. E.g. there might be something like "unexpected power loss" or similar.

Spoiler

 

[191x7]

Please name the PSU you have (manufacturer and model), that would help.

 

Also, I've seen issues where the power button on the case was the culprit, it was shorting and caused random PC shutdowns, can happen to the reset button too.

[OnionRings]

On 10/9/2022 at 7:35 AM, Eigenvektor said:

Opening Event Viewer is pretty simple, just press start and enter "Event Viewer" and you should find it. Then navigate to Windows Logs > System. See if there are any entries with a red exclamation mark. Maybe also check below Applications and Services Logs > Hardware Events. If you click on the entry you should see some (more or less helpful) explanation of the event. E.g. there might be something like "unexpected power loss" or similar.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

This looks promising. 

 

And then the same 3 found lower down at the first restart. So, looks like CPU error. I am gonna try streaming on a less demanding setting to start and see if that can rule that out, since this is a first time issue.

[Eigenvektor]

13 hours ago, OnionRings said:

This looks promising.

And then the same 3 found lower down at the first restart. So, looks like CPU error. I am gonna try streaming on a less demanding setting to start and see if that can rule that out, since this is a first time issue.

It's fairly unlikely the CPU itself is defective, could still point to it getting too little power during short peaks. As long as its not consistently reproducible it'll be hard to check, but you could try if a BIOS update fixes it (if available) or maybe try lowering the RAM overclock from 3600 to 3200 for a while.

[OnionRings]

Forgot to update. It didn't happen anymore after I changed the OBS setting, so it must have something to do with power and load. I'll leave it alone for now.