Computer Constantly Restarting When Playing Games

[quantum303]

I've had my custom gaming PC for about two years and have never encountered any serious problems. Lately, though, I've been having an issue where when playing games the computer completely restarts. I have no idea why thus far. I'll be playing Shadow Warrior 2 for an hour and not have this occur, but as soon as I load up the menu of the Outlast 2 demo, it shuts off, which indicates that maybe it has nothing to do with the weight of the overall program, but then again when doing anything else with my PC (browsing the net, writing in LibreOffice, etc.) this never happens.

 

I've scoured the internet for similar situations, but none have really been close enough to what I've encountered.

 

Specs:

CPU: Intel i5 4460

OS: Windows 10 64-bit

BIOS Version: F8, just updated today at the time of writing (Oct 31, 2016)

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-UD5H-BK (LGA 1150)

GPU: ASUS Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC (4gb VRAM)

PSU: Corsair HX 850 ATX Power Supply

RAM: Corsair VENGEANCE Blue 2 sticks of 4gb (total 8GB)

HDD/SSD: One 250 GB for the system OS (I think it was a Samsung 840 EVO) 114 GB free, one 2TB HDD (1.22 TB free), and one additional 250 GB SSD (158 GB free) for additional space.

Cooling Unit: Not sure, but it's a Corsair Liquid Cooling unit with two fans and about a 9-inch radiator. Sorry for the lack of detail, but I doubt the information is that relevant anyway.

 

Guys, I'm really about to pull my hair out over this. I can't figure out what's wrong. My first guess was overheating, but Core Temp v1.4 tells me that at idle, my four cores all sit at (around) 25 degrees C. When gaming, they go to about 40 degrees C.

 

Additionally, I've taken 3/4 of a can of compressed air to the thing, and while I did free up a lot of dust for sure (including turning the PSU on its side to help blow out some dust), my temps have stayed largely the same and I'm still getting the random restart issue.

 

Far as I can tell, all of my graphics drivers are up to date. I've scanned all three drives for viruses but nothing came up, and anyway, I stick to reputable sites 99.99% of the time, so I'd never figure out WHERE I'd get a virus. This issue starting happening upon heavily modding Fallout: New Vegas, but the mods I obtained all came from the Nexus and were reputable mods in their own right, so it doesn't seem feasible that these mod creators would include a virus in there.

 

But yeah. Hopefully I've included enough information.

[Enderman]

Windows event viewer tells you why a PC shuts down.

[quantum303]

Hmm. I wasn't aware of this tool. According to what I can gather, I've gotten 3 critical errors in the last HOUR.

 

Event 41 means that it didn't reboot cleanly. As I said before this ONLY happens when playing a video game. I'm only getting a "Bugcheck Code 0" message in the "Details" tab.

Edited November 1, 2016 by quantum303
Added more information after researching

[meenmeen1103]

Re-seat the power connectors from PSU?

[quantum303]

As in the connectors going into the motherboard? I disconnected some connectors going INTO the PSU and reseated the additional power connectors for my GPU.

 

Edit: Also just reseated the 24-pin connector going into the Motherboard that is next to my RAM.

Edited November 1, 2016 by quantum303
Reseated the 24-pin Connector