Brother's Computer Randomly Restarting

[Enderess]

So, I'll try to make this short and simple, as I don't want to ramble  (PS, not happening)

 

So, about last year (like, really close to exaclty last year), my brother got a new PC for Christmas, as an old Optiplex with an old graphics card stuck in is not very good for gaming 

 

I was a CybertronPC Rhodium 950 X8 Gaming PC, a prebuilt, however from the reviews (thought now that I read some of them I see that others are having issues..), the systems that they made seemed to be a decent choice, so that was the computer he got. It ran very well when he first received it, as it could play games with WAY higher framerates than the old PC, and overall I thought that it was a decent PC... until a few months ago...

 

Soon, about a few months ago, his computer was acting slower. He has Malwarebytes premium and Windows Defender running a lot, with Malwarebytes running when the PC is not in use, so I doubted that it was a virus or something, but that is not the end of the problems.

 

Soon it started randomly restarting. Sometimes it might have been something ordinary like a windows update, but a lot of those times, it was just completely out of the blue. No blue screens, no error messages most of the time. He did say that a few times it said something about restarting to prevent overheating or something, but the last time he has seen that, he says was a few months ago. We recently dusted out the PC since then, and luckily we have not gotten that in a while.

 

Later, recently, his computer would start restarting again. It was dusted again not too long ago, however this time is different. Whenever he turns on the computer after it reboots or shuts off, it is incredibly laggy, like with nothing opening. I am not really sure how many times this has happened, however last night was the worst, as cortana was frozen open, covering the option to restart the computer, task manager opened, being very laggy, and refused to close until it stopped responding, and the fans were overall very loud, like when they are under load. I have heard that turning on the computer can be very CPU intensive, and overall taxing to all of the parts, however his computer has been fine for a little while.

 

Their was also this awful screechy sound that he told me about, and when he uplugged the computer, it stopped, but I have heard that bad PSU's can do that.

 

He also said that it mainly would restart during more graphically better games, ones that would make his fans really go. Games like Garry's Mod... not so much, but games like Arma 3 (high settings with mods).

 

All of this information leads me to believe that this is PSU issue, as it usually happens during the games that put his PC under more load, and not on barely any other occasions.

 

Here are his PC specs:

 

CPU: AMD FX-8300

GPU: ZOTAC GTX 1050

RAM: 16 Gigabytes

Hard drive: 1000 Gigabyte SATA III

Cooling: N/A (I have no clue, sorry)

Power Supply: sl-f500 (500 watt)

Motherboard: ASUS M5A78L‑M PLUS

SMBIOS version: 2.5

BIOS mode: Legacy

 

 

Annnnnd.. finnallyyyyyy!

 

OS: Windows 10 Home 64 bit

 

To wrap it up:

 

• He did not overclock anything
• He did not ever even try to do anything like update BIOS
• We both think that it is probably a power supply issue

 

What do you guys think? I honestly don't really know if it is a power supply issue, but whether or not it is anything, I think that it is kind of annoying that it has been less than a year old and it is already having issues.

 

Have a nice day, and thanks for your time!

[MrDrWho13]

I'd say power supply issue. I think the screeching sound could be a capacitor going haywire. Best to replace that PSU with a better quality one. The slowness is likely due to the HDD, so I'd also get an SSD for the boot drive. Not much else you can do now though since that system is nearing the end of its life in terms of performance.

[Enderess]

2 minutes ago, MrDrWho13 said:

I'd say power supply issue. I think the screeching sound could be a capacitor going haywire. Best to replace that PSU with a better quality one. The slowness is likely due to the HDD, so I'd also get an SSD for the boot drive. Not much else you can do now though since that system is nearing the end of its life in terms of performance.

Thanks for the response. My brother is currently gone right now, but I'll show him when he gets back. I'm not completely sure about the HDD though, if we go with replacing the PSU should we just use it and if it keeps showing signs of a bad hard drive, we get an SSD?

[doomsriker]

It could be a power supply issue, especially if it has a cheap bargain bin psu from a nobody brand as many pre- Builts do. if this is the case I assuming that 1050 does not need a PCI-E 6 pin, go find that dell optiplex and transplant the PSU from it. A lot of older optiplexes had relay good PSUs, and unless it is one of those small form factor ones it should be able to push more than enough of watts to that system. All that being said, i'm not sure the PSU is the problem. There are two other possibilities. First assuming he has his games on a hard drive, it could be failing. If the hard drive is failing, it would have data corruption. Bigger games = more data = more chances for that data to be corrupted somewhere on the failing hard drive. Another possibility is faulty ram. Often cheap or heavily used ram will work, but will slowly fail over time causing general system instability. This could cause the both crashes  (random RAM dumps) and the hanging (Stuff getting "stuck" in ram). Honestly I would be skeptical of the reliability of just about every component in that system aside from the gtx 1050 . That CPU and motherboard are years older than that GTX 1050. This sounds like one of those Ebay sellers who sells "gaming PCs" assembled from the cheapest used components they can get there hands on. I would not be surprised if that hard drive has seen thousands of read write cycles in a server and that ram has seen similar abuse.   

[Enderess]

1 hour ago, doomsriker said:

It could be a power supply issue, especially if it has a cheap bargain bin psu from a nobody brand as many pre- Builts do. if this is the case I assuming that 1050 does not need a PCI-E 6 pin, go find that dell optiplex and transplant the PSU from it. A lot of older optiplexes had relay good PSUs, and unless it is one of those small form factor ones it should be able to push more than enough of watts to that system. All that being said, i'm not sure the PSU is the problem. There are two other possibilities. First assuming he has his games on a hard drive, it could be failing. If the hard drive is failing, it would have data corruption. Bigger games = more data = more chances for that data to be corrupted somewhere on the failing hard drive. Another possibility is faulty ram. Often cheap or heavily used ram will work, but will slowly fail over time causing general system instability. This could cause the both crashes  (random RAM dumps) and the hanging (Stuff getting "stuck" in ram). Honestly I would be skeptical of the reliability of just about every component in that system aside from the gtx 1050 . That CPU and motherboard are years older than that GTX 1050. This sounds like one of those Ebay sellers who sells "gaming PCs" assembled from the cheapest used components they can get there hands on. I would not be surprised if that hard drive has seen thousands of read write cycles in a server and that ram has seen similar abuse.   

Thanks for the response. I would love to take the PSU out of the optiplex and test it, however my sister uses that PC everyday, and for school, so I can't do that, and we got it off of craigslist a while back from some random dude who totally put the sidepanel on because we have never been able to get it open. We do have a random old E-machines computer with Windows XP laying around, that might have a salvageable PSU, but I am not sure the wattage, and I don't know who's room it is in, though nobody is using it, as 2 gigs of ram in that thing is SLOW.

 

Hard drive failure does seem like something that could possibly be happening, so I'll look into that. Darn this could add up.

 

I was thinking a bit about RAM earlier too, I might try to reseat it to see if that works. It could definetially be faulty RAM. RAM isn't very expensive, and once again I am pretty sure I could find some salvageable RAM somewhere, however I need to check and see what type of RAM his computer uses. The computer I am typing this on has some pretty old RAM, but it might work, however I will research a but ti clarify.

 

I do agree though, as honesly the whole PC company seems kind of sketchy. Now that I read the reviews, the more I am seeing similar complaints. Hey though, to get some credit, at least we went to Amazon instead of Ebay, I mean, even I am not that low, and won't go there unless I am looking for an old component, like an old GPU or something.

 

Thanks for the help, I will talk to him when he gets back. This sucks, but I will try what I can.

 

Thanks, and have a good evening.

 

[Enderess]

Thanks for the responses guys, I will talk to him about it when he gets back and see what works, and what doesn't. I honestly almost never trust prebuilts anymore (kind of hypocritical that I am using one, though I am replacing many of the parts.)

 

Thanks and have a nice evening.