My computer keeps restarting whenever I play X-COM or Dishonored.

[Bat Vader]

For the last couple of days I have been having both a problem with Dishonored and X-COM. If I plau them for more than an hour or so my computer will crash and reboot. A friend of mine has been helping me with the problem and there is no problem with my hard drives, graphics card, or processor.

I have an AMD FX 8150 8 core processor, AMD HD 7970 graphics card, I have a crosshair 5 motherboard so I know that my PC is more than capable of running them.

I don't seem to have a problem with any other games except for Dishonored and X-COM.

I would appreciate any help or advice. Has anyone else also been having this problem?

 

[Tethalaki]

will crash and reboot.

A bit vague. Does it blue-screen or does it just reboot immediately?

Do you play many other recently released games?

How long ago did you get the computer? If it's brand new and it's blue screening it could be that something isn't seated right (probably your memory).

Have you updated the drivers on your Graphics Card recently? If not: try updating. If you have: try rolling back to older drivers.

If it reboots immediately it's probably a heat issue. You could check this by running something like CPU HWMonitor [http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html] and keep an eye on it while you play. If the temperature goes over 90C (190~ F) on either the CPU or the Graphics card than that's likely the problem (100C is normally about the point where your PC will reboot to stop itself from cooking).

 

[ResonanceSD]

Er, how much RAM do you have? And what else do you have running when you open those two games?


And what's your heatsink? It's either memory or heat XD

 

[Bat Vader]

will crash and reboot.

A bit vague. Does it blue-screen or does it just reboot immediately?

Do you play many other recently released games?

How long ago did you get the computer? If it's brand new and it's blue screening it could be that something isn't seated right (probably your memory).

Have you updated the drivers on your Graphics Card recently? If not: try updating. If you have: try rolling back to older drivers.

If it reboots immediately it's probably a heat issue. You could check this by running something like CPU HWMonitor [http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html] and keep an eye on it while you play. If the temperature goes over 90C (190~ F) on either the CPU or the Graphics card than that's likely the problem (100C is normally about the point where your PC will reboot to stop itself from cooking).

The screen goes black and within a few seconds the computer restarts. The only other recent released games I play are The Walking Dead, Max Payne 3, Borderlands 2,and Darkstalkers 2. They are all fine. It is only X-COM and Dishonored.

My friend built it for me back in June and I picked it up at the end of June. It is brand new. I will try updating the drivers on my graphics card and see if that helps.

 

[Joccaren]

Sounds to me like a heat problem, and with reasonably high end parts you NEED good cooling and cable management. If the CPU or GPU gets too hot, it will restart the computer to stop itself from overheating and dying. This is likely your problem.

The solution is rather simple. Get some better airflow in the case.
You might need to get a new case, so that you have more room for fans, but if you've got a decent case this shouldn't be necessary.
You might need to get more or better fans, as this will push more air and keep your PC overall cooler.
You might need to better manage the cables inside the PC so its not blocking airflow.
You might want to get some cheap liquid cooling for the CPU, so you don't have to deal with its heat so much in the case.
You might want to clean out the parts and make sure there's not a ton of dust clogging them up.

 

[Bat Vader]

Snip

I do have three fans in my case and I also have liquid cooling as well. I clean it out every two weeks. It is a very large case and none of the cables seem to blocking any airflow.

Snip

I don't have any other programs running when I play my games. I have 16 gigabytes of RAM.

Snip

I am using HWMonitr right now with Dishonored running and the hugest temperature on my CPU is 39C(102-F)and my graphics card is at 44C(111-F).

 

[xefaros]

Try updating sound drivers a friend of me had lock ups similar to yours and solved his problem by updating the sound drivers which is kinda weird. Other than that and the heating problem the only thing that comes to mind is overlapping drivers so a clean format would save trouble going around searching for that kind of problem.
Or it could be incompatibility between hardware parts unless you can trust your friend

 

[GoaThief]

Keep an eye on the temperature after you've been playing a while.

It's strange that it's time based, this usually means heat problems (eg; your friend may have applied TIM incorrectly) but I'm not so sure in this case. As they're both new games, did you have to install direct x or other proprietary updates? Perhaps the install of that or your games went awry. Might be worth checking the health of your hard drive whilst you're figuring all this out. It could also be dodgy RAM although I'd expect problens would show themselves elsewhere too.

There's also some "bad" advice in this thread (seems par for the course on the escapist) so I wouldn't go overboard buying loads of new shit or similar and still having the same problem!

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

First of all, turn off automatic reboots when the PC crashes so you can see the blue screen and possibly useful error message. Usually under Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Startup & Recovery -> Untick "Auto Restart".

I'd say if it's only those particular games, and not others, there's something very strange going on indeed that would be very hard to troubleshoot. If that were the case, I'd say it's the games themselves, perhaps reinstalling them would be the place to start (backing up save games first obviously) or updating to the latest drivers. Failing that, try using an older driver.

Assuming it's consistent for when you play most demanding games, it's likely:

- GFX card drivers
- GFX card overheating
- Not enough power
- Antivirus doing something unwelcome in background

The error message on the blue screen you will get if you turn off auto restarts will be useful here as it will hopefully mention something that points to the source of the problem. Specifics are largely unimportant, but try and note if it mentions "amd" or "ati" or "catalyst" or something along those lines.

 

[Domogo]

My only experience with this would be with a much older computer but my issues were bad ram or overheating and then I had pretty much worn out my CPU (seriously old) other then that the ideas about the sound drivers might work (similar to the skyrim problem parhps?) if possible try to test your system with something just as stressing like running several high process programs and such and attempt to recreate. If you can't recreate out side of the games I would figured out what is being used exclusively by them (or at least the only thing being used hard) and I would assume that is your problem.

that's about all I can think of I'm usually better if I can look at and work with it.

 

[distortedreality]

Sounds like dud GPU memory to me, are you getting any artifacts happening before the shut down?

 

[TrevHead]

Has one of your fans failed?

Sounds like dud GPU memory to me, are you getting any artifacts happening before the shut down?

My gfx card's fan failed on an old PC and it would shut down in much the same way, I'd get artifact's including lines coming out of polygons as it overheated. It still ran 2D games flawlessly.

I'd guess that for memory it would show artifacts as soon as the game starts, and not get worse as the GPU overheats

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

Absolutely not, and no one should.

Since this thread is currently going nowhere, I suggest you boot up the Event Viewer and have a look at

> Windows Logs > System

If you know the time(s) of failure, scroll to get to them and look out for nasty red things. Report back in with what they say.

If you don't know the time(s), it's probably easiest to just click on the 'Level' header and wait for the list to be sorted. The critical errors should pop up on top of the newly sorted list, and there's a chance they'll let you/us know what's going on.

Strange that other titles seem to be working flawlessly, but I've seen stranger.

Your RAM is a set of identical sticks?

Have you tried running your system and those games as-is, with only one/two sticks of memory at a time?

Is your system in any way overclocked?

What's the rated power output of your power supply?

 

[distortedreality]

Has one of your fans failed?

Sounds like dud GPU memory to me, are you getting any artifacts happening before the shut down?

My gfx card's fan failed on an old PC and it would shut down in much the same way, I'd get artifact's including lines coming out of polygons as it overheated. It still ran 2D games flawlessly.

I'd guess that for memory it would show artifacts as soon as the game starts, and not get worse as the GPU overheats

You must of missed the part where the temps were listed and were fine

Regarding the memory, yeah you're right, normally artifacts would start straight away. But I remember when I had an 8800 the same thing happened, I thought it was overheating, turned out to be faulty memory on the board, so it can happen.

 

[xDarc]

If it were me, I would back up my stuff on my OS drive and just reformat and reinstall. If it still does it after a fresh OS install and no driver issues; then I'd start fiddling with hardware.

I had something similar years ago, ended up being a bad stick of RAM. But it could also could be driver issues. Event viewer should clue you in. But OS reinstall is cheap and quick.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Sounds like a power supply issue to me, at least that is what I would look at first.

 

[getoffmycloud]

I hate to tell you this but your graphics card is dying this happened to me a few weeks back you will need to replace it.