 | PC Keeps Shutting Down Playing D3 - My Fix(1) | Category: Technical SupportAugust-18-2013 7:14 AM PDT (9 years ago)  |
| Please find the steps I took to get back to being able to play Diablo 3 – I hope the summary helps and gives you some ideas to fix your issue. So after reading many forum posts both in Diablo 3 and in general I decided to try a number of steps (took about 2 weeks). The hardest part was the fact that it wasn’t a specific task/pint in time that caused the shutdown but it began to be quite regular (only when gaming). But I found that if I was playing Diablo 3 for around 10 minutes the whole machine would just power off. I managed to have the same symptoms when just being in the character collection screen but just the once. So I tried (roughly in this order) Updating the graphics card drivers – No change still shutdown after some game play Disabling a couple of Win 7 services – Application Experience Monitor etc – No change still shutdown after some game play Turning on v-sync as a lot of people say that can cause conflicts and crashing – No change still shutdown after some game play Turning the FPS down to 60 as a lot of posts say that the monitor at 60Hz only handles that so no need for anymore – No change still shutdown after some game play (no real change in graphics display either) Turning the various graphics options down to Low (shading etc) – No change still shutdown after some game play Ticking the Low Graphics option – No change still shutdown after some game play At this point I was pretty much out of options with Diablo 3 and where to go next. So decided to try stressing components outside of Diablo 3, thinking one of them must be getting too hot and causing a hardware shutdown. At this point I also decided to clean all the fans (as well as I could with them still attached) - No change still shutdown after some game play From my monitoring (using NVIDIA System Monitor and HWMonitor) I knew that the GPU ran at about 80C and the cores ran at about 58C - 62C under load. So to stress the GPU I manually turned the fan down (and off auto) and ran the GPU up to around 95C to see if it automatically shutdown – No shutdown I then used OCCT to stress test the CPU and GPU again, only for 15 – 20 mins at a time but enough for them to get hot and cause an automatic shutdown. CPU both cores at over 75C which is way above Diablo 3 usage – No shutdown GPU at over 90C again way above Diablo 3 usage – No Shutdown I also did the PSU and Linpack test – No Shutdown At this point I was all out of ideas, so I though let’s try another game, fired up Starcraft 2. It crashed after starting a mission! So I hear you cry it’s a Blizzard game too... So I fired up Supreme Commander on my XP partition (so not Blizzard and a different OS). It crashed after about 15 mins of game play. So now a breakthrough of sorts, defiantly looking more hardware related. So I swapped the cables going to the graphics card into other slots in the modular power supply - No change still shutdown after some game play So I had read that PC shutdowns were sometimes related to PSU’s starting to fade. I was highly sceptical of this but of the components it was probably the easiest to change. If I was replacing the CPU, memory or motherboard it would probably mean replacing them all. No point buying some old DDR2 to go on the motherboard and then finding it is the motherboard etc. So I took the plunge and bought a new PSU (850w) which is way more than I needed (replacing the 650W). The PSU was definitely not underrated before as only running 1xGTX260. Fitted it all back together – So far so good. At least 8 hours of Diablo 3 game play no issues – everything gradually set back to high. Supreme commander (2 hour game with 250+ units) – all fine. So please try the steps I did above and hopefully you'll fix it before having buy anything else. But for me the PSU fixed it. Feel free to comment if this helped. On a side note the GPU seems to run 10C cooler even though the fan speed has stayed the same. | ||
 | PC Keeps Shutting Down Playing D3 - My Fix(2) | August-20-2013 4:11 AM PDT (9 years ago) |
| Glad to hear you found the cause, obviously changing PSU is an extreme step but I'm glad to hear it worked for you. | ||
