TR Forums

Hey,

I am having a crash in games and I can't figure out how to resolve it. I think it is related to the relative GPU load, but my old card wasn't far out of date, and the new card is, you know, new.

The crash is hard, reboot.

Here are the scenarios...
Far Cry 5 crashes
Dishonoured 2 crashes
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided crashes
Fallout 4 doesn't crash, but did with older card
TES Skyrim doesn't crash, but did with older card
SWTOR doesn't always crash, might crash depending on settings, but did with older card

With the old card, for diagnostics, I tried to ramp up the graphics settings in SWTOR to see what caused crashes. I set resolution low, and quality to lowest and then walked it up step by step. On low res and low qualities, played for hours, but when the settings went up, crash.

I measured temperatures and didn't see abnormal spikes or high numbers.

System Info:
i7-2600K at stock
Asus P67 Sabertooth
Corsair Dominator 16gb
Old GPU: Gigabyte 980
New GPU: EVGA 1080 Ti
Corsair CPU water cooling
Corsair HX750W
Samsung 850 1Tb SSD
Creative Fatality X-FI
Samsung S3 1Tb HD
LG DVD
Windows 10:1709

It's hard to know without more info, but kinda sounds like a PSU problem.

Have you checked Event Viewer to see what's going on?

PSU or motherboard, but it sounds like a power delivery problem to the GPU, since the crashes tend to be in the games with higher GPU demand.

The HX series were decent, but they're also 9 years old, I'm assuming you bought yours in 2011 at the time of the build so it's 7 years old which is 4 years longer than the warranty and probably a year or so older that I'd be comfortable with.

High quality supplies like the HX still require liquid electrolyte capacitors for the main phase and even the best quality japanese capacitors will dry out over time, they ought to last longer than the cheaper ones, but their performance drops off exponentially towards the end of their life so even if they're over-specced to give them an easy life, they'll still change from 'working fine' to 'not performing adequatelly' in a fairly short time span.

Yeah, PSU is the easiest device to test, and usually the first to go in any build.

I'd buy a new PSU. You can always return it if that's not the cause.

PSU - Even though that is a quality unit and wattage should be enough, sometimes they just go bad. I would probably get another one in there if you have a spare to both test that for sure is the problem as well as protect the rest of your system from the hard shutdowns. I had that exact same thing on my EVGA 550 watt unit. At first I thought it was meltdown/spectre reboot issues (haswell based system) until I rolled back to before the updates installed and the reboots were still there. Replaced the PSU under warranty and back to rock-solid.

If it turns out to not be that you could always do a clean install on a spare drive to see if it's software related. Could be a snafu between old and new GPU drivers giving grief when you go into 3D.

If it isn't either of those two I would look at the motherboard next, but I wouldn't think that would just show during gaming.