Just had the weirdest computer crash...

[Brontech]

From what I know, when your computer crashes, it brings you to the BSOD and tells you an approximate error of what happened. However this crash was quite different.. I was launching a quite demanding game and before I loaded into the main menu of the game, suddenly my three monitors went grey and a had some artifacting on the middle monitor for a split second and then went away. It then just stayed like that until I restarted my computer. This only happened once though, so it may have just been a software slip up, but I just want to know what you guys think on the forums of what you could have thought of what happened. I may just be a bit over cautious, but could it be a video card error? I will keep this thread updated if this error happens again. 

Here Are my Desktop Specs:

i7 8700K, watercooled - 4.9GHZ, tested thoroughly beforehand stable

GTX 1080 ASUS Strix - No OC

16GB Ram

Gigabyte gaming 5 mobo

800W Bronze rated PSU

3x 1080p monitors with Nvidia surround

 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

My guess is unrecoverable driver crash. Look in Event Viewer and see what Windows reported it as.

[Brontech]

Thanks for the reply!

I went on event viewer and windows reported it as a "Critical Kernal-Power" error.

"The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."

Seems to be a normal crash.. But I still cant figure out why it didn't bring me to the BSOD.

[mr cheese]

1 hour ago, Brontech said:

Thanks for the reply!

I went on event viewer and windows reported it as a "Critical Kernal-Power" error.

"The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."

Seems to be a normal crash.. But I still cant figure out why it didn't bring me to the BSOD.

Were there any entries before that?

[Brontech]

No, from what I see, there were no warnings that happened before the crash, only the Kernal-Power crash is what was logged.
 

 

[ElSeniorTaco]

Imo, It is possible that this is a hardware failure of some kind. 

Can you recreate the event?

Does the computer work fine now?

 

Keep track if it happens again and the frequency in which it happens.

If it is a hardware failure, many times it will get worse and worse progressively. 

Could be anything from motherboard, gpu, psu, maybe ram.

I would put my guess on psu or gpu though if it is indeed hardware failure.

 

As a start. If you can indeed replicate it, remove your overclocking and see if it still happens

It's helpful to know that when your computer randomly shuts down or hangs with no events but a power failure, alot of times this turns out to be some piece of hardware failing.

 

Generally, in any software related failure, your computer throws up an error/ event along with that blue screen.

When it cant throw up a bluescreen, it tends to be the hardware components failing in some way causing a hang, some sort of circuit protection to kick in, or just outright power off / nutty symptoms from voltage fluctuations or some miscalculation etc.

This usually causes the OS not to be able to jump in and diagnose what is happening.

 

Although this is not always the case, in many instances it is.

But all you can do is keep track of everything you can (symptoms, when and what it was doing when it crashed, any oddities etc) so we can come up with a diagnosis.

 

But before we go chasing after anything we first need to gather more information and determine what this really is.

Realistically it can be anything from software to hardware.

If you can replicate the problem, it will give us more detail on whats going on and how it occurs.

Then from there, we can suggest a diagnosis method / solution etc.

 

Let us know what you find.

 

[teddygala]

15 hours ago, Brontech said:

Thanks for the reply!

I went on event viewer and windows reported it as a "Critical Kernal-Power" error.

"The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."

Seems to be a normal crash.. But I still cant figure out why it didn't bring me to the BSOD.

Start quoting people

[Ace McPlane]

On 3/25/2018 at 5:48 PM, Brontech said:

From what I know, when your computer crashes, it brings you to the BSOD and tells you an approximate error of what happened. However this crash was quite different.. I was launching a quite demanding game and before I loaded into the main menu of the game, suddenly my three monitors went grey and a had some artifacting on the middle monitor for a split second and then went away. It then just stayed like that until I restarted my computer. This only happened once though, so it may have just been a software slip up, but I just want to know what you guys think on the forums of what you could have thought of what happened. I may just be a bit over cautious, but could it be a video card error? I will keep this thread updated if this error happens again. 

Here Are my Desktop Specs:

i7 8700K, watercooled - 4.9GHZ, tested thoroughly beforehand stable

GTX 1080 ASUS Strix - No OC

16GB Ram

Gigabyte gaming 5 mobo

800W Bronze rated PSU

3x 1080p monitors with Nvidia surround

 

Unexpected shutdowns are an extremely common error.

You need to get more information to find the specific problem.

First of all, turn off any overclocks you have because they can cause this if they don't have enough voltage or whatever.

 

Second, event viewer is great, but there's another way to find info on a crash that might get us more information.

Hit the windows key, type reliability history, open that, find the date when the crash happened, and tell us what the errors say. Each one. The most important one should be listed as a critical error. The blue ones are just updates. Ignore those.

 

The reliability history, when you double click on the problem, often points you to a specific DLL that crashed so that may help us find out what exactly is the culprit.

 

Oh and yea, you need to quote people here or else we don't see the replies..

 

[Brontech]

On 3/25/2018 at 10:33 PM, ElSeniorTaco said:

Imo, It is possible that this is a hardware failure of some kind. 

Can you recreate the event?

Does the computer work fine now?

 

Keep track if it happens again and the frequency in which it happens.

If it is a hardware failure, many times it will get worse and worse progressively. 

Could be anything from motherboard, gpu, psu, maybe ram.

I would put my guess on psu or gpu though if it is indeed hardware failure.

 

As a start. If you can indeed replicate it, remove your overclocking and see if it still happens

It's helpful to know that when your computer randomly shuts down or hangs with no events but a power failure, alot of times this turns out to be some piece of hardware failing.

 

Generally, in any software related failure, your computer throws up an error/ event along with that blue screen.

When it cant throw up a bluescreen, it tends to be the hardware components failing in some way causing a hang, some sort of circuit protection to kick in, or just outright power off / nutty symptoms from voltage fluctuations or some miscalculation etc.

This usually causes the OS not to be able to jump in and diagnose what is happening.

 

Although this is not always the case, in many instances it is.

But all you can do is keep track of everything you can (symptoms, when and what it was doing when it crashed, any oddities etc) so we can come up with a diagnosis.

 

But before we go chasing after anything we first need to gather more information and determine what this really is.

Realistically it can be anything from software to hardware.

If you can replicate the problem, it will give us more detail on whats going on and how it occurs.

Then from there, we can suggest a diagnosis method / solution etc.

 

Let us know what you find.

 

I'm currently trying to replicate the crash, but I'm unable to do so. I'm starting to think it may have just been a software slip-up that just caused the error. I'll update this thread if the same error comes back.

[Brontech]

5 hours ago, stateofpsychosis said:

Unexpected shutdowns are an extremely common error.

You need to get more information to find the specific problem.

First of all, turn off any overclocks you have because they can cause this if they don't have enough voltage or whatever.

 

Second, event viewer is great, but there's another way to find info on a crash that might get us more information.

Hit the windows key, type reliability history, open that, find the date when the crash happened, and tell us what the errors say. Each one. The most important one should be listed as a critical error. The blue ones are just updates. Ignore those.

 

The reliability history, when you double click on the problem, often points you to a specific DLL that crashed so that may help us find out what exactly is the culprit.

 

Oh and yea, you need to quote people here or else we don't see the replies..

 

I went on to "Reliability History" and I found one critical error that said similar things to Event Viewer. All that I could find was that it said that "Windows was not properly shut down", and when I view technical details, it says that "The Previous shut down was unexpected", and nothing else. I'm probably just going to move on and just be on the lookout if the error comes back, thanks for the reply tough!

[Ace McPlane]

14 hours ago, Brontech said:

I went on to "Reliability History" and I found one critical error that said similar things to Event Viewer. All that I could find was that it said that "Windows was not properly shut down", and when I view technical details, it says that "The Previous shut down was unexpected", and nothing else. I'm probably just going to move on and just be on the lookout if the error comes back, thanks for the reply tough!

Are you sure?

There's should be something on what file it was. Like a DLL.

Even if not, it should have an event ID.

Information you might think you should ignore that's actually critical in finding the problem