System becomes unstable after a while

Stormcrowfleet · October 29, 2018

I have a 5 year old gaming computer. It used to work fine until a bunch of random crashes started happening. I suspected the RAM, and after testing my system with memtest discovered what appeared to be 2 bad RAM DIMMs out of my 4. Once I removed them and passed the memtest, I tried to swap things around (swap the good ones with the bad ones, place the good ones in the slots where the bad ones were, etc.) to see if it's really the RAM or the motherboard. Seems to be the motherboard, but in a non obvious way: neither the RAM nor the ports appear to be bad, it's just that for whatever reason my motherboard now has a problem when I'm using more than 2 sticks of RAM. Fine. 2 sticks of RAM is still 8 GB in my case, and it's perfectly good enough to play any game I want to play at high settings. I left the matter alone.

Now it looks like the problem evolved. Whenever I boot my computer, I can pretty much do whatever, including play any resource intensive game I want to with no time limits. Strangely enough, once I quit the game, and use my computer for a while, I can no longer play any games; they all crash right when gameplay starts, and I have to restart my computer to be able to game again. The crash message is always generic (along the lines of "this program was terminated abnormally").

Clearly my hardware is not in the best shape. Still, here's what I'd like to do about it:

I would like to do some kind of diagnostic on my GPU to see if it is damaged, or if my motherboard had picked up yet another malady. I would also like to know where I can find meaningful crash information. There doesn't seem to be anything useful in Windows Event Viewer; perhaps there is something from Nvidia that I can use? Finally, is there a way to restart the GPU without having to restart my whole computer? I know how to restart the GPU driver, but that doesn't seem to help.

I'm running GeForce 1070 on Windows 10.

Thanks.

UPDATE: I disabled the GPU via device manager and reenabled it with speculative hotkey usage. Games still crash.

Tristerin · October 29, 2018

18 minutes ago, Stormcrowfleet said:

I have a 5 year old gaming computer. It used to work fine until a bunch of random crashes started happening. I suspected the RAM, and after testing my system with memtest discovered what appeared to be 2 bad RAM DIMMs out of my 4. Once I removed them and passed the memtest, I tried to swap things around (swap the good ones with the bad ones, place the good ones in the slots where the bad ones were, etc.) to see if it's really the RAM or the motherboard. Seems to be the motherboard, but in a non obvious way: neither the RAM nor the ports appear to be bad, it's just that for whatever reason my motherboard now has a problem when I'm using more than 2 sticks of RAM. Fine. 2 sticks of RAM is still 8 GB in my case, and it's perfectly good enough to play any game I want to play at high settings. I left the matter alone.

Now it looks like the problem evolved. Whenever I boot my computer, I can pretty much do whatever, including play any resource intensive game I want to with no time limits. Strangely enough, once I quit the game, and use my computer for a while, I can no longer play any games; they all crash right when gameplay starts, and I have to restart my computer to be able to game again. The crash message is always generic (along the lines of "this program was terminated abnormally").

Clearly my hardware is not in the best shape. Still, here's what I'd like to do about it:

I would like to do some kind of diagnostic on my GPU to see if it is damaged, or if my motherboard had picked up yet another malady. I would also like to know where I can find meaningful crash information. There doesn't seem to be anything useful in Windows Event Viewer; perhaps there is something from Nvidia that I can use? Finally, is there a way to restart the GPU without having to restart my whole computer? I know how to restart the GPU driver, but that doesn't seem to help.

I'm running GeForce 1070 on Windows 10.

Thanks.

UPDATE: I disabled the GPU via device manager and reenabled it with speculative hotkey usage. Games still crash.

Are you running any sort of Overclock? The reason I ask is that I have issues with opening applications when Overclocking if my voltage isn't set right to handle the spike of power so it closes whatever it is trying to run. Im absolutely unsure of what is causing this just trying to understand...

can you list exact PC specs?