Is it PSU, mother$%#$ or faulty memory?

Junglecharly

 Dudes and dudettes, recently i started playing Valeera in Heroes of the Storm, a character i once hated with passion. I was killing people left and right and i got fanmail and hatemail. One particular message cursed my pc and since then, every time -every freaking time- i am loading in a hots match my pc restarts. That hag killed my pc and my fun. I tried overwatch the same thing happened.

Anyway, i know magic doesn't exist but what is the actual issue here? I am broke so i can't go fixing everything. I have a geforce 660 and i am using this setup for like 3 years with no troubles. My cat threw a ball with force on the case the other day but she felt bad afterwards and i don't think it actually caused any kind of problems.

I will appreciate your answer and i'll see what money i can gather by spitting fire on sidewalks while doing diabolo tricks if it is actually new hardware i must buy.

Daikuru

Does it happen only while loading or ingame too? What specs do you exactly have? OS, HDD, RAM ect.

Junglecharly

It happened ingame i think three times and now i can't even load in a match anymore. It restarts during loading. I even lowered the graphics, turned off shadows and everything, nothing changed.

I have an i5 4570- 3.2ghz with windows 10 64 - 8gigs RAM and the HDD is WDC WD5000AAKX-00ERMA0

Loke666

Get memtest 86 or another memcheck program. Preferably one you can burn to a booting CD or put on a booting USB stick.

It does sound like it is a faulty ram memory that is most likely. It is however possible that it is a byte on the CPUs cash as well (a friend had that problem, took me forever to figure that one out) but that is very unlikely.

If the memtester find a broken byte or more, then remove all sticks besides one and run it again until you tested all of them. If you have the error with everyone on them it is the cash memory instead or the memory on your GFX card.

Before doing anything, update your GFX drivers.

The thing with a single broken byte is that it can be rather long between crashes. That broken cash byte I talked about crashed every 15 hours or so, using memtest is by far the easiest way to figure it out.

And yes, it isn't the motherboard. It could also be a heating problem (dust in the fans maybe?) or a powerissue. You should check your windows logs as well and see what they tell you.

Daikuru

Okay, its sounds like a RAM or HDD problem to me , what you can do now is to test both RAM and HDD to locate the issue. I think WD has a tool for it, for  the RAM you can use memtest or another tool.

Nightlite

PC restarts with no blue screen? sounds like a power supply issue to me.

Vrika

Both HotS and Overwatch are Blizzard's games. Do you have other relatively modern games, and do they work all right?

If the problem appears only in Blizzard's games, you should also test deleting Blizzard's launcher and all its data, then doing clean reinstall.

Hyperpsycrow

Check your power suplys cable..the big one that connects your motherboard..it happend for me once and it turned out one of the pin conecters was fried or damaged. So the motherboard did not get full power and was restarting when i played games.

Also just check all ur cables if they are fine ur burned in both ends

Moxom914

switch to consoles. problem solved

Quizzical

That sounds like it could be a corrupted game installation.  If it were just one game that had the problem while all others worked fine, I would almost guarantee that that was the issue.  With two different Blizzard games, they could be relying on something in common that is corrupted.  Do other games work fine, or do they crash at loading, too?

Loading games shouldn't push most hardware hard unless Blizzard is doing something creatively stupid.  If the problem were caused by overheating or a bad power supply, you might expect crashes while playing the game, but not on loading it.  Loading games will push your storage and use a lot of memory, but if that were the problem, I'd expect it to crash on loading Windows.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to get memtest86 as Loke said.  If you suspect bad memory, then you might as well check it directly.

DarkHigh

I would start with checking your CPU temps, Powersupply next. Those are really the only two components that will flat out reboot without a message of some kind.

Junglecharly

Appreciate all the answers dudes! Thanks really.
So, i have already tested temperatures and the highest is my graphics card which goes 64 Celsius as far as i have noticed. Cpu temps are 61-62 Celsius. My gfx drivers are updated.

-I have switched to another power cable because instinctively i thought of that but the problem persisted.

-I will clean dust, could be the root of the problem.

-I tried the diagnostic tool for my hard disc and it showed no errors.

-Next on list is to try the memtest tool and delete the blizzard launcher.

-I don't have any other games installed right now except Blizzard ones but i am getting to it.

Wizardry

I have noticed a LOT of problems with Hearthstone since last patch,the game is running like a toaster,a slow toaster and it should be running very fast.It is so bad,i feel like quitting every time i start playing.
IMO Blizzard is just bad at what they do,EVERY single time they patch it is problems.Just like OP,i can play every other game and no changes,no problems but login to a Blizzard game,it is like amateur hour,reminds me of this site sometimes with paragraphs not working or non secure for several months after every other site was using secure standards.

If you are not having issues any other games outside of Blizzard,then likely drivers with Blizzard games/file corruption or the slim possibility those games so happened to be loaded in a bad sector of your HD "i doubt it".

My personal experience,the only two times i ever had a pc reboot was  mostly the faulty wiring harness plug,power supply was failing and corrupted windows files.Oh there is one other problem but shouldn't cause a reboot and that is lack of memory,too many memory leeches on at same time your booting up games,that would cause slow downs and lockups but not usually a reboot.

Cleffy

Clean dust trapped in the GPU fins.

Phry

Prime 95 is a good tester for several things, it can test the integrity of the CPU, the Ram and also identify if there is a problem with overheating, its also FREE 

Loke666

Quizzical said:

That sounds like it could be a corrupted game installation.  If it were just one game that had the problem while all others worked fine, I would almost guarantee that that was the issue.  With two different Blizzard games, they could be relying on something in common that is corrupted.  Do other games work fine, or do they crash at loading, too?

Loading games shouldn't push most hardware hard unless Blizzard is doing something creatively stupid.  If the problem were caused by overheating or a bad power supply, you might expect crashes while playing the game, but not on loading it.  Loading games will push your storage and use a lot of memory, but if that were the problem, I'd expect it to crash on loading Windows.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to get memtest86 as Loke said.  If you suspect bad memory, then you might as well check it directly.

Bad memory sometimes leads to crashes with no bluescreen, I have never seen the same for heat or a game with bad sectors (which doesn't mean it isn't possible).

It is of course possible that it is a faulty file from Blizzard and deleting all Blizzard content and reinstalling it from scratch is something worth doing if you can't find a faulty ram chip.

A single byte can take a long time before crashing the computer, as I said above a single byte in the cash made a friends computer crash every 15 hours or so and the cash is far smaller then a regular slot memory. The computer might still crash at any time but the more memory you uses the higher the odds for it.

Bad ram chip is relatively common, I give it 75% chanse of that.

Quizzical

Loke666 said:

Quizzical said:

That sounds like it could be a corrupted game installation.  If it were just one game that had the problem while all others worked fine, I would almost guarantee that that was the issue.  With two different Blizzard games, they could be relying on something in common that is corrupted.  Do other games work fine, or do they crash at loading, too?

Loading games shouldn't push most hardware hard unless Blizzard is doing something creatively stupid.  If the problem were caused by overheating or a bad power supply, you might expect crashes while playing the game, but not on loading it.  Loading games will push your storage and use a lot of memory, but if that were the problem, I'd expect it to crash on loading Windows.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to get memtest86 as Loke said.  If you suspect bad memory, then you might as well check it directly.

Bad memory sometimes leads to crashes with no bluescreen, I have never seen the same for heat or a game with bad sectors (which doesn't mean it isn't possible).

It is of course possible that it is a faulty file from Blizzard and deleting all Blizzard content and reinstalling it from scratch is something worth doing if you can't find a faulty ram chip.

A single byte can take a long time before crashing the computer, as I said above a single byte in the cash made a friends computer crash every 15 hours or so and the cash is far smaller then a regular slot memory. The computer might still crash at any time but the more memory you uses the higher the odds for it.

Bad ram chip is relatively common, I give it 75% chanse of that.

When the Windows 10 1511 update came out, that made launching Elsword reboot.  There was technically an extremely brief blue screen, though it was so fast that it was usually gone before there was time for a single frame to show up on the monitor.  That was technically just some incompatibility between the game and the OS, not corrupted files.  But my point is that it can cause a reboot without seeing a blue screen, which is what I'd guess if the crash is so repeatable.

Regardless, the solution is to check both.  Try running memtest86 and see if it finds anything.  Also try other games and see if the problem is restricted to Blizzard.  Either problem is plausible here. 

Junglecharly

Another update on the situation. Thanks again for helping.

So, tested RAM with memtest86 and came out clean, all passes-no errors whatsoever.

-Played League Of legends, two matches, lost both but no restarts.

-Played Eve Online for a couple of hours, trying to scam in Jita and going to null, no restarts.

-Played This war of mine a couple of hours and no restarts.

Maybe these games are not pushing my system a lot but i have nothing else installed.

I am gonna clean inside for dust today and reinstall both blizzard games. Otherwise it might the most popular opinion here that is actually the power supply.

Vrika

Junglecharly said:

Another update on the situation. Thanks again for helping.

So, tested RAM with memtest86 and came out clean, all passes-no errors whatsoever.

-Played League Of legends, two matches, lost both but no restarts.

-Played Eve Online for a couple of hours, trying to scam in Jita and going to null, no restarts.

-Played This war of mine a couple of hours and no restarts.

Maybe these games are not pushing my system a lot but i have nothing else installed.

I am gonna clean inside for dust today and reinstall both blizzard games. Otherwise it might the most popular opinion here that is actually the power supply.

If you don't have any good games you could try testing your system with something like
  Free version of 3DMark: https://www.futuremark.com/support/downloads
  or Final Fantasy XV benchmark tool: http://benchmark.finalfantasyxv.com/na/

kjempff

Assuming you only see this in one game:
It is unlikely that it is a hardware problem, except a hard drive fault (bad sector, read error) which I would check for first. 
More likely, it is some patch for your game that changed something .. and that something hits a driver bug (directx, gfx driver) or bios issue.. try checking for driver updates and maybe bios update for your gfx card and maybe mainboard.
Uninstalling and reinstalling could be an option to try, it might be a corrupted file.

..I forgot the cause of 49% of all pc problems, Antivirus (although not likely to cause a restart like that)

saurus123

PSU issue for sure, get a new one

Junglecharly

Update on the situation: 

Pc restarted after a failed antivirus installation on Sunday, showed a message about automatic repair and it was looping without ever entering windows. Couldn't format, couldn't recover windows.

I went to the techno guy and he tested all the equipment, found everything in perfect health and managed to format my disc. Still haven't found what the freaking issue actually was. At least i have my pc back

Thumbs up and thanks