PC restarting itself (ungracefully) - Any thoughts?

azibux1

azibux1

azibux1

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Joined
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Hi,

Last week one day the PC restarted itself ungracefully after about 10 minutes of running (nothing intensive, just Netflix) then again after about 10 minutes it happened again and was then fine for the rest of the night.

The other day it happened again a couple of times.

Yesterday it happened about 3 or 4 times, couple of those times it was not anywhere near 10 minutes, it pretty much just booted and then went down again.

What happens?

- Randomly restarts
- Boots up fine itself after the restart without me needing to press the power button
- Leaves this behind in event viewer:

The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.
Click to expand...

There are no error codes within the event itself to indicate what caused it.

PSU is about 9 years old as are most of the components (apart from AIO cooler and GFX card which is GTX970) - rest of spec is as per signature

Going to run memtest but any other ideas aside from that. Could PSU be on the way out? Would that cause restarts?

Thanks!
 
something daft already!! said:
Give it a clean out, remove dust, make sure all fans work and the CPU is not over heating. Check temps.

It could be the PSU but stress test it to check.
Click to expand...
Thanks! It should be relatively dust-free as I try keep on top of that, but I'll take a look.

Is there a recommended method to stress test a PSU? I wasn't aware of that being a 'thing'

Cheers
 
azibux1 said:
Thanks! It should be relatively dust-free as I try keep on top of that, but I'll take a look.

Is there a recommended method to stress test a PSU? I wasn't aware of that being a 'thing'

Cheers
Click to expand...
A couple of hours of prime should rule it out.

Also it could be the cpu if you have it overclocked, its old now and may have degraded to the point where the overclock isnt stable. You could try lowering the overclock or giving it a few more volts.
 
Joxeon said:
A couple of hours of prime should rule it out.

Also it could be the cpu if you have it overclocked, its old now and may have degraded to the point where the overclock isnt stable. You could try lowering the overclock or giving it a few more volts.
Click to expand...
Apologies I think my signature is out of date in that regard, I think I did remove the overclock a while ago as I wasn't really maxing it out ever - but will check that also!

Cheers
 
I must confess that I have never had a problem with a PSU other than it catching fire! But certainly what you are getting here sounds like a what hardware engineers tell me is a failing capacitor. In other words its fine when it's warm but is dodgy when its cold. It could be in the power supply but it could also be on the motherboard. Unfortunately with things like that I tend to find that they just get worse and worse until they completely fail.
 
Have you tried the 'sniff test'. If it's a capacitor, that should help locate where your issue is. If it's not popped yet, it might do shortly.

For sanity, I'd re-seat all cables, dimms, cpu etc just to make sure it's not something simple.

Also, back off the OC a bit - see if that cures it.
 
Cause is likely somewhere in CPU, mobo, PSU axis.
Unless it was top quality PSU nine years is lots of time if you use PC lot daily.
Also for example motherboard's CPU VRM could be tiring especially when having overclocked.
And neither are CPUs immune to wear, especially if it has seen overvolting.
 
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