Red screen of death? Now what...

Marlon89

Marlon89

Marlon89

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Joined
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135
Hey all

I think i might have a issue not sure anyways ive been playing world of warcraft for like a month no issues untill today...
I started it up and when i pressed enter game suddently my screen went full red and made a brrrrrrrrrrrr buzz noise and then my pc restarted..
This has never happened before what was it? Will it come back? And what do i do?

My specs are
Ryzen 5 1500x stock no overclocks
Asus motherboard forgot the name i can look it up if need be
8gb ddr4 crucial
Antec 400watt gold certified psu
Radeon rx 550 from gigabyte
And ssd from kingston
All stock settings..
And latest gpu drivers
 
After restarting, did it boot as normal and does it still work?

The "made a brrrrrrrrrrrr buzz noise" is the only thing that sounds like it could be trouble. Unexpected noises are usually unwelcome on a PC. However...if I really had to hazard a guess I'd plump for a graphics error resulting in the cooling fan on your graphics card briefly running at 100% speed before the restart. 'brrrrrrr' being the fan speed increasing and 'buzz' being the fan running at full speed. I'm not saying that's definitely what happened, but it could happen and it would explain the noise. The graphics card fan speed is variable and software controlled, so it's possible that a failure would result in the fan speed defaulting to 100%.

Assuming that the PC will boot as normal, check that the cooling fans are working and check temperatures. All fans and temps, but especially the graphics card. I use hwinfo64 for that, but use whatever you use. If it's all OK, place components under load and watch the temps. If your hardware monitoring software supports logging results, you could use that while playing WoW to test the cooling. Or you could use benchmarking software to place components under a reliably very high load. Fans and temps are an easy first thing to check and will cause crashes if there's a problem with them, so it's a good place to start. Loading the CPU and GPU seperately might allow you to narrow down the cause, which would be useful.

It could be other things, but that would be a good start.

Of course, it's always possible that Microsoft has "updated" your software without your knowledge or consent and broken something. That happens often since MS changed their procedures to give them control of all computers running Windows and with a net connection apart from some holdouts on Win7 who have disabled automatic updating and manually search for security-only patches (MS doesn't allow security-only patches using Windows Update any more, not since they decided to try to become the biggest malware provider on the planet). If that's the case, well, good luck. There might be a fix. Or not.

Or it might have been caused by some obscure software issue and never happen again.
 
Angilion said:
After restarting, did it boot as normal and does it still work?

The "made a brrrrrrrrrrrr buzz noise" is the only thing that sounds like it could be trouble. Unexpected noises are usually unwelcome on a PC. However...if I really had to hazard a guess I'd plump for a graphics error resulting in the cooling fan on your graphics card briefly running at 100% speed before the restart. 'brrrrrrr' being the fan speed increasing and 'buzz' being the fan running at full speed. I'm not saying that's definitely what happened, but it could happen and it would explain the noise. The graphics card fan speed is variable and software controlled, so it's possible that a failure would result in the fan speed defaulting to 100%.

Assuming that the PC will boot as normal, check that the cooling fans are working and check temperatures. All fans and temps, but especially the graphics card. I use hwinfo64 for that, but use whatever you use. If it's all OK, place components under load and watch the temps. If your hardware monitoring software supports logging results, you could use that while playing WoW to test the cooling. Or you could use benchmarking software to place components under a reliably very high load. Fans and temps are an easy first thing to check and will cause crashes if there's a problem with them, so it's a good place to start. Loading the CPU and GPU seperately might allow you to narrow down the cause, which would be useful.

It could be other things, but that would be a good start.

Of course, it's always possible that Microsoft has "updated" your software without your knowledge or consent and broken something. That happens often since MS changed their procedures to give them control of all computers running Windows and with a net connection apart from some holdouts on Win7 who have disabled automatic updating and manually search for security-only patches (MS doesn't allow security-only patches using Windows Update any more, not since they decided to try to become the biggest malware provider on the planet). If that's the case, well, good luck. There might be a fix. Or not.

Or it might have been caused by some obscure software issue and never happen again.
Click to expand...

No the brrrrr buzz sound came through the speakers when the screen froze displayinf just a red screen then pc rebooted also ive build this pc like 3 months ago and this was the first time it did this...
What was it?
Should i be concerned?
 
Do a GPU stress test and see if it keeps happening, check cooling when doing so.

If it fails, RMA. If it passes, put it down to the joys of owning a PC. :(
 
Marlon89 said:
No the brrrrr buzz sound came through the speakers when the screen froze displayinf just a red screen then pc rebooted also ive build this pc like 3 months ago and this was the first time it did this...
What was it?
Should i be concerned?
Click to expand...

In that case, I'd put my money with MagicBoy's suggestion:

MagicBoy said:
More likely the sound card continuing to output something in the buffer...
Click to expand...

They key question remains the same:

Angilion said:
After restarting, did it boot as normal and does it still work?
Click to expand...

And the rest of my suggested troubleshooting stands as it was. Just add checking sound as well. If it now makes sounds as normal, the sound was just data from the soundcard and most likely a result of the crash rather than a cause of it.

If you stress test the GPU and CPU as suggested and the fans spin and your PC doesn't crash and the temps are OK, I'd be inclined to chalk it up to software, some obscure combination of OS, drivers and game that crashed your PC particularly hard. You could add in testing the RAM and the drive(s) if you want to be thorough. Software that provides SMART data from drives should be able to tell you if there has been a read error on a drive, so that would be a useful quick test. A full test of a HDD if you have one will take hours, so it's something to run when you're not going to want to use the PC for that time, but a bad sector on a HDD that happens to be where a file is stored would cause a crash when that file is used and might be the cause. Probably not on a 3 month old drive, but it'll cost you nothing to check.

I'd be concerned enough to do those basic troubleshooting steps, but no more than that. I'd also run a full malware scan just to be on the safe side, but I'm assuming you do that anyway.

If it works now and nothing is overheating, I wouldn't be concerned as long as it didn't happen again and even then I wouldn't be much concerned unless it happened when not playing WoW. I've just had a quick search and there are quite a few references to WoW, specifically WoW, crashing with the red screen of death.

You could also look at the Windows logs to try to narrow down the cause of the crash, but that's a bit of a faff if you're not used to it and might or might not be much use anyway. There are guides on how to do so online.
 
Angilion said:
In that case, I'd put my money with MagicBoy's suggestion:



They key question remains the same:



And the rest of my suggested troubleshooting stands as it was. Just add checking sound as well. If it now makes sounds as normal, the sound was just data from the soundcard and most likely a result of the crash rather than a cause of it.

If you stress test the GPU and CPU as suggested and the fans spin and your PC doesn't crash and the temps are OK, I'd be inclined to chalk it up to software, some obscure combination of OS, drivers and game that crashed your PC particularly hard. You could add in testing the RAM and the drive(s) if you want to be thorough. Software that provides SMART data from drives should be able to tell you if there has been a read error on a drive, so that would be a useful quick test. A full test of a HDD if you have one will take hours, so it's something to run when you're not going to want to use the PC for that time, but a bad sector on a HDD that happens to be where a file is stored would cause a crash when that file is used and might be the cause. Probably not on a 3 month old drive, but it'll cost you nothing to check.

I'd be concerned enough to do those basic troubleshooting steps, but no more than that. I'd also run a full malware scan just to be on the safe side, but I'm assuming you do that anyway.

If it works now and nothing is overheating, I wouldn't be concerned as long as it didn't happen again and even then I wouldn't be much concerned unless it happened when not playing WoW. I've just had a quick search and there are quite a few references to WoW, specifically WoW, crashing with the red screen of death.

You could also look at the Windows logs to try to narrow down the cause of the crash, but that's a bit of a faff if you're not used to it and might or might not be much use anyway. There are guides on how to do so online.
Click to expand...


Really ? It could just of been wow that crashed my pc hard?
I played all night last night didnt happen again i hope it wont...
Im rly scared because i read online thats usually a hardware fault?
And weird just a read screen then reboot...
Right when i pressed enter game it crashed my pc so could have been wow?
 
Quite likely. Some random combination of circumstances. My particular poison is iRacing and that managed to hard lock the old PC a couple of times over the years mid-race with the looping sound thing. The PC hardware was absolutely fine after I threw a load of tests at it. Only thing that had changed in the last few weeks was a graphics drive, so I rolled back and it didn't happen again. As said above, it's worth running Memtest to check the RAM.

This sort of thing can happen with gaming PCs as there's nearly unlimited combinations of hardware and software. It's even worse with Microsoft's quality of update patches for Windows 10 being utterly garbage. A specific thing in a bit of software might trigger an error in a particular combination of hardware running a specific driver version. That said they work much more reliably than they used to back when I worked in PC retail 20 years ago. It even happens with consoles, and they've got about 3 combinations to test!
 
just been looking online and regarding the red screen of death, multiple articals sugest the following to check

1) check your psu volatges via bios or via hwmoniter within windows if the 12v, 5v or 3.3v rails fall too low or are too hight +/-5% that will cause hard locks
(if psu voltages are outside +/-5% you will need to replace the psu, as running a doddgy psu will case major problems down the line)
2) run a series of stress tests on the cpu and gpu, plenty of programs out there to do this (important to check temps, if too high pc will lock and crash)
3)run a memory stres test to check the stability of yor ram if the test fails go into bios and check your ram timmings and volatge (correct if wrong)
4)if the above tests all pass with no crashing then it's something to do with software installed, this can be a tricky one to solve but a good stating point is the most recent install you did, try uninstalling it and start wow and see if the pc locks again, if it does i'd say try updating you motherboard drivers, if you have the latest gpu drivers installed it wouldn't hurt to roll back to a slightly older version just to check stability.
5)try uninstalling wow and do a clean install to see if its the game thats playing up, if so and the games works after with no lockups hey presto its fixed
6)if you still have no luck and pc keeps crashing then the only option is to reinstall windows, if you have to do this make sure to back up everything you need, doc's, save game proflies etc, most likely a peace of software has corrupted either in winows or someare else, and the only way to fix is to reinstall.

i hope this helps you solve the probelm you have, on a side note dont be scared, its best to find out the problems early before anything else goes wrong:)
 
Marlon89 said:
Really ? It could just of been wow that crashed my pc hard?
Click to expand...

Could have been, yes. A more controlled crash with a blue screen and an error message is more likely with software problems, but it's not always the case. For example, I've had a PC lock up entirely with a couple of seconds of sound looping. Sudden reboots too. It happens. You've got the OS, various drivers for various hardware, the game and various other programs all running at the same time. That gives a huge multitude of combinations of software and hardware and different versions of the software. It's impossible for any software to be tested with all possible combinations, especially as many of them wouldn't have existed when the software was written. It can be as obscure as a specific version of a game crashing in specific circumstances in the game (e.g. when entering a particular area), but only with a specific version of the graphics driver, only with a particular model of graphics card, etc, etc.

I played all night last night didnt happen again i hope it wont...
Im rly scared because i read online thats usually a hardware fault?
Click to expand...

Usually isn't always, though. I would still advise doing the testing that has been suggested, but a hardware fault is more likely to be repeated. If, for example, a component was overheating under load and WoW was a high enough load to cause that overheating then it would be rather unlikely that you could play WoW all night without it crashing. Hardware faults being repeated isn't a hard and fast rule, of course, but it's a decent rule of thumb.

And weird just a read screen then reboot...
Click to expand...

Not really weird - both are part of Windows error handling - just unusual.

Right when i pressed enter game it crashed my pc so could have been wow?
Click to expand...

Yes. Or, more likely, a combination of that particular version of WoW and some other software and maybe hardware. It's possible, for example, for WoW to trigger a crash with a specific version of a graphics driver but only on some graphics cards. The graphics driver is often involved because of its complexity, although it could be anything. Red screens are apparently graphics related, but even if that's true (I don't know - I've just read that it is) it could still be either hardware or software.

But I would still do the suggested hardware tests anyway. It won't cost any money and it'll either rule out hardware failure, which would probably help put your mind at rest, or let you find which component is dodgy if any are, which will help you fix the problem. Either way, it'll be useful.
 
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