[Troubleshooting] PC Randomly Restarting

[HDudeness]

Specs:

AMD 8350

MSI 970 GAMING (MB)

MSI GTX 970 4GB

Ripjaws X Series (8GB)

Samsung 840 128 GB

Rosewill Valens 500

Windows 8.1 Professional 64-bit

 

In the past few weeks, I would sometimes be playing something, in this case Witcher 3, and would either press a certain button or enter a certain area and my computer woudl restart - no warnings, no errors; just a sudden black screen and I'm back to Windows in a few seconds. I decided to try to fix this issue, because some days it was whatever, but other days it would happen so often that even sometimes I will click something in champion select in League of Legends and it would restart out of nowhere. It occurred enough to where it was irritating, but in no way made my machine unplayable; maybe two or three restarts unless I fired up Borderlands 2 or the Witcher 3, which I tended to stay away from and instead played League of Legends, which I had little to no problems with.

 

Before I get into the other issues, let me clear a few things up

 

Yes, I

 

-checked my temperatures which have been always idling at around 35 C; heat is not an issue.

-checked to see if my power supply was faulty on another machine, which it was not.

-preformed a CMOS clear by removing the battery and letting it sit for 20 minutes and placing it back in. I also shorted the included jumper on the board.

 

My BIOS settings is in the attached file. The settings you see were present after I updated the BIOS 4 times to different versions and after I went into the BIOS settings and reset it to factory settings.DRAM voltage is at about 1.488 if you can't see it.

 

Now, I did several things to try and fix this.

 

First, I went into the Windows Error Log center on my PC and found that my external HD that holds all of my steam games "failed then was recovered", so I initially thought to reformat the HD because something may have been corrupted. I did so, re-downloaded Witcher 3, and it was still abruptly restarting without any error logs or warnings.

 

Next, I thought to update my BIOS from MSI's 20.0 version to 22.0. I first went into MSI's support program called MSI Live Update and downloaded all drivers and BIOS versions they recommended, then hit "Total Installer". One by one, it went through all the drivers and downloaded them properly, then got to the BIOS and went through the flashing process that locked my mouse and keyboard and told me not to power down the system. Obviously, I let it do its thing and that's when things started getting weird.

 

After it did all the restarts required to get driver updates installed properly, it got into the screen with the blue Windows 8 logo with the loading wheel and brought me to the login screen. I pressed shift to raise the login wallpaper, and the computer instantly black screened and restarted exactly as before.

 

After trying to login (I was successful once; I got into my desktop for a few seconds then it cut to black and restarted.) a good 10-20 times, I resorted to going on another computer and go on MSI's website to download the BIOS onto a flashdrive and go into the BIOS on my PC to download it using the BIOS's flashing sequence. It flashed just fine, and I let it go into the Windows login screen. I pressed shift to lift the login wallpaper, began typing my password, and got two letters through before it black screened and restarted.

 

If I let the computer go for however long I'd like, the restarting will loop and continue to go as long as it pleases.

 

Literally half an hour from me posting this I have gone through the system recovery steps and have completely reinstalled Windows 8 and currently have a fresh install. Restarts still occur as usual. The reason I highly doubt the issue is because of my SSD is the fact that it was performing great up until after I updated my BIOS.

 

TL;DR My computer had been having occasional random restarts without any warnings for at least a month (I've had the system since January) so I decided to try and fix it by updating hardware drivers .so it would go away completely; ever since I updated the BIOS, the restarts happen every time I reach the Windows login screen.  FYI restarts never happen in BIOS or Windows Recovery, only when Windows launches like normal.

 

If anyone can help me to where I don't have to buy an i5 4690 with an ASUS motherboard for $300 something dollars because I hecked up my motherboard, that would be fantastic. Thanks!

 

-HDudeness

 

[HDudeness]

I guess I fixed it, whatever then ;D

[someone_else]

How did you fix it? I´ve been having sort of the same problem, my pc restarting but only when I do something in windowed mode (I can play games for 5 hours no problem but after 20-30 min in windowed mode it restarts.) 

 

I have checked temps and they are not that good but I dont think that temps would be the problem since it would restart when gaming aswell.

 

The only things that i can think of thst could cause this it the motherboard or a windows bug.

 

But again, how did you fix it and thank in advace!