Game crashing my PC

[AngeldelaMuerte]

So I have a crashing problem a bit different to all the others. I'll be playing the game just fine and then all of a sudden the screen cuts to black and my computer turns itself off and restarts. On restarting there are no error messages of the 'Windows didn't shut down correctly' or 'Windows encountered a problem and had to restart' it just restarts as if nothing happened.

I played this game a little bit (>2 hours) a while back and don't remember this happening but now that I've come back to it I can't stop it. The time before the game crashes varies, I just updated my graphics drivers and was playing fine for about 45 minutes and thought the problem solved before it crashed on me again. I've verfied game cache, checked firewall and anti-virus, reinstalled the whole game and tried deleting the folder from AppData as suggested by another post. I'm at my wits end and it's really frustrating me as it's a really fun game.

My system has 8GB RAM, i5-4670k and Radeon R9 290 and I can play newer gen games (Dragon Age Inquisition, Borderlands Pre-Sequel etc.) with no problems so I don't think it's a specs issue. If anyone has encountered a similar problem or might have an idea why it's happening, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[KhanIndustries]

Well the good news is the type of crash, where your computer shuts itself down, limits where you have to look for the problem. A self shutdown is a more serious issue because many times it means a big problem occured and the computer shut itself down to prevent actual damage to a component assuming of course that none of your hardware is already malfunctioning such as the power supply which can also manifest into a self shutdown.

In most cases a self shutdown as opposed to a bluescreen or error message are caused by these things usually:

-Thermal limit was reached (overheating), when a component like say the processor reaches a certain temp it will shut itself down in an effort to prevent physical damage. Sometimes this can produce a bluescreen however instead of a shutdown and when looked at with BluScreen View you will see it burried in that blue screen report that a thermal limit was reached and was stopped. If this game is causing a reset and other times/programs you experience periodical blue screens this might be the case.

-Hardware malfunction. Especially the power supply, it will cause a self shutdown if its sending too much or too little power. Power usage is constantly scaled duirng high/low usage of different components and could be failing when called to supply either more or less power. I doubt this is your case because the problem would appear pretty much every time regardless of program and that doesn't appear to be happening to you.

** the third and final below is the one I'm betting on in your case because other programs seem to be working fine and you have a CPU with unlocked multipliers which means its overclockable **

-An overclocking problem. A self shutdown could be that the motherboard is trying to scale the processor a bit too much during a sudden change in cpu usage and when it attempts this it sends a bit too little (can't function) or too much (temp) voltage during that time causing the system to shutdown. Usually will happen during a sudden dip/spike in cpu usuage which calls for a sudden change in voltage. Your MotherBoard probably has a built in profile to auto overclock your processor because it detected you have an Intel (K) and you might need to turn it off or input the overclocking parameters manually, a set that is more stable. A self shutdown caused by overclocking can even be reproduced by going into the overclocking section of your BIOS and pushing your processor to a point where stability becomes an overwhelming issue appearing as bluescreens and/or self initiated shutdowns. Before motherboards started doing "auto overclocking" in the day you HAD to input all the settings manually and part of the process was starting out trying to push your processor as hard as you could which resulted in these same symptoms. You then would scale it back until you came up with a profile that you were happy with in terms of trading off performance versus stability.

In any case, you want to track down what is causing this problem even if this is the only program to give the symptom because while I'm no hardware engineer.. my gut tells me that it cant be good for the life of the hardware that is constantly hitting either its thermal or power limits or getting awfully close to those limits when in other games and everything appears to be fine.

Good luck, hope you fix this.

*PS I had the same problem you are having right now, exactly the same. My case was an overclocking problem in which the symptoms were appearing in one game (not this one) and not others. Turns out in mine, my Asus Revo was attempting to push my i5-2500k too much (I think or see below) using its built in auto OC profiles and the voltage settings were tripping a reset. I'm glad I tracked that down because that doesn't sound good.

Oh and last thing on overclocking, I had a strange problem where Intel SpeedTech was interferring with my MotherBoard overclocking which was kind of doing the same thing. Intel SpeedTech automatically ramps up and down the power usage of the processor during periods of high/low usage so check that out. It can be disabled in BIOS before having to go through the hell of gathering a stable set of OC parameters, inputing all your OC settings manually, testing and repeating until satisfied!

[AngeldelaMuerte]

Thanks for the help man. I actually just figured out how to fix this problem (although I'm still a bit mystified why this fix actually worked). I have Raptr for my AMD card although I often don't use it because it causes problems when I play Skyrim. However, as a last ditch effort I used Raptr to optimize the game and launched it through there. Since then I've played a total of about 4 hours without a crash. so here's hoping it's fixed. Should any crashing occur again I'll be sure to look into your advice.

Thank you for your response anyway.

[Smokey]

That crash sounds as a power supply issue
the psu needs more power when your other parts work hard (motherboard-cpu-gpu-ram)

If you own the game darksiders 2 and also get this crash in that game then its 100% sure its the psu there need more power because of your other parts are working heavy

[AngeldelaMuerte]

I do own Darksiders 2 and I've finished the game no problems. Launching through Raptr seems to have cleared up the problem.