Brother Glacius Posted January 16, 2021 Report Share Posted January 16, 2021 Hey Ordo, Hopefully some of you more knowledgeable peeps out there can help me out. Suddenly, starting yesterday evening, my PC started to reboot. Here is what I know: It happens when playing a game. Can occur while playing, or sometimes just starting it up. There seems to be no error reported of any kind and the reboot happens immediately. My screens go dark, and then the reboot takes place. I don't hear any disruption in power. My PC has been running most of the day today. I started up overwatch to see if putting it in a lower res would let me play. The system rebooted and never even started the game. That being said, I was keeping an eye on my case to see if there was a disruption of power, but I didn't see or hear anything. The fans were still going uninterrupted and the lights seemed constant. My graphics card has the latest drivers. There have been no significant changes to the system. I do run MalwareBytes premium to look for viruses. I have run HWmonitor and see no sudden spikes in heat before things restart. I'm just stumped. The event monitor isn't showing me anything that looks like a cause either. And unfortunately, it is a 3 week wait at my local repair shop. I am simply stumped at this point. At first I thought it was a power supply issue. I have not seen the fan move at all in the last day. That being said, it reboots right away and I have seen no other indication of power issues. The other main culprit could be the video card as it seems directly related to gaming. But having a whole system reboot as opposed to just the game crashing seems odd to me. so really, I just need some help. Any advice on what this could be would be great. As a precaution, and because it was inexpensive, I've ordered a new power supply and will be putting it in on Monday. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duckman Posted January 17, 2021 Report Share Posted January 17, 2021 My guess would be a short. What you have described is something you can see if you over-tax power on the motherboard. An older mobo supporting a higher end videocard on a slot that can just barely handle the power draw can and will eventually start shorting across the pins. This results in a clean reboot when it shorts. More strain on the card results in more power draw and kicks the short causing a reboot. Without identifying where the short really is this one can be hard to fix. That's just one of many options, of course... It's just the one that always bites me when I have upgraded a graphics card on a machine. 3 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brother Glacius Posted January 20, 2021 Author Report Share Posted January 20, 2021 well it turns out it was the power supply. yay! That was a cheap fix and got it running again with about an hours work and testing. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Romans832 Posted January 21, 2021 Report Share Posted January 21, 2021 Wicked! Glad it was THAT easy... I was thinking drivers... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justjokin Posted January 21, 2021 Report Share Posted January 21, 2021 Nice work! Just like what Duckman described: I had a power supply that would work just fine until the video card increased it's draw during high performance. Caused a 'blip' in the power supply enough to cycle the mainboard. And yep, swapping out the PSU was the key! Never got a sense of whether it was an actual short or some sort of thermal protection not quite working right. Or maybe it's a feature! As a rule of thumb, strip down to the minimum pieces of hardware to reproduce the problem, and swap likely culprits from least expensive to most. (Parts value + labor difficulty to replace) 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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