How to Fix PC Shutting Down When Playing GamesPosted by Vinding Marcher on May 21st, 2021 So my gaming PC here was completely shutting down when gaming, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to create a troubleshooting guide. Little did I know that this wasn't just a quick power supply fix and I ended up having to use days worth of time to troubleshoot I even had to phone a friend and almost completely replace this entire system. This is gon na, be an in-depth guide. Let'S get into it: [ Music, ], hey, welcome to Zach's tack, turf today, we're gon na be troubleshooting a gaming PC completely shutting down or rebooting one gaming. I think you're gon na learn something today and if you new here - and you want to see possibly more troubleshooting videos like this in the future, then hit that subscribe button down below and also that notification bell. That way, you never miss an episode, but before we get into it a quick word from today's sponsor today's video is brought to you by Paul sway, which is a really neat, remote monitoring and management software that I've actually deployed across my entire network down here. In my studio, Paul sway is an all-in-one network management platform that allows you to remotely monitor and even control all of your devices that you installed the lightweight client on which, by the way, pretty much every operating system is supported. I personally really like the phone application, because it allows me to quickly see what's going on with all of my devices, such as their temperatures. What processes are running and I can even run scripts and perform Windows updates, no matter where I'm at in the world. For us PC gamers, this is perfect because it allows us to start up those lengthy Windows updates, while we're away so we know our gaming rigs are one more percent good to go when we get home, there's also pages and pages of notification settings to configure. So you can get all sorts of alerts from your devices head on down to the first link in the description to score yourself: a free version account which supports up to two devices or use discount codes ett to save two months off your next subscription. Alright. So, first and foremost, if I didn't make myself crystal clear, this gaming PC was completely shutting down like 100 % powering down at what seemed like random intervals when gaming. If this is currently happening to you or possibly it might happen to you in the future, then this should be a big help and maybe I'll give you some ideas. So, first up the number one step that I would always recommend just to get the basic stuff out of the way is to ensure that all of your drivers in operating system are completely updated. This is obviously just a basic step and it's probably even a good idea to run something like ddu uninstaller to completely uninstall your graphics card driver, and then you want to completely reinstall it, but yeah there's not too much else to this step. So, let's move on. If that doesn't fix it, I would highly recommend finding some sort of benchmark or possibly even use a game to find a consistent and reliable point where the gaming PC shuts off that way. You can easily test your next fixes in the future. This is important because you need some sort of consistent baseline, where your PC always shuts off that way. When you applied the next fix, you can easily tell if it worked or not. I would highly recommend downloading some sort of stress test for your components. For me personally, first I downloaded 3d mark times by because it stresses both the GPU and the CPU, but my computer could actually run the entire thing and not fail so that wasn't pushing my system hard enough. Next up, I downloaded Cinebench, which exclusively pushes the CPU, but just like times by, I could run this thing back to back, and the computer remained perfectly fine. Where things got interesting is when I downloaded the heaven benchmark, which exclusively pushes the graphics card and within three to five minutes, my PC would shut down consistently every single time, because Cinebench could run on my system perfectly fine and heaven cause the computer shut down this Quickly narrow my focus down to somewhere around the GPU region for this issue, the next thing I did was download some sort of temperature monitoring software. I personally always choose MSI Afterburner, because you can keep the overlay up during the benchmark, and here I was looking to see if the GPU was getting too hot and causing it to shut down. I ended up running the heaven benchmark and here I cannotice that the CPU temperatures were pretty much normal and the GPU temperatures were only ever getting up to like 70 degrees Celsius, which is definitely perfectly fine. So this pretty much eliminated any cooling issues. For my specific case, after ruling out the temperature issues now is when I realized and honestly probably should have a few steps ago, that I should probably reset my BIOS settings back to stock, because I could have left a stray overclocking setting or something to cause. The system to not work properly, if your GPU is overclocked, I would highly recommend just from moving that overclock at this time. Basically, you just want every setting to be at factory settings to eliminate those from being an issue. This ended up not doing anything differently. For me, so it was time to start swapping out components. In my specific case, I was pretty confident that it was the power supply that was going bad, usually if the computer is completely shutting down, it's somehow related to power, but before I swapped out the PSU, I ended up receiving all of the connectors physically uninstalling them And reinstalling them, but that didn't do anything for me either. After that, I was honestly very convinced that the power supply was just bad, so I ended up swapping out this 750 watt Rosewell model for a six hundred and twenty watts II sonic. This is obviously only available to you if you have an extra PSU laying around and lo and behold after I got everything back up and running. The PC was still shutting down by swapping out the PSU and getting the exact same results. This may feel like a waste of time, but I did learn some valuable information that the PSU is definitely not the problem in this case because of the previous heaven benchmark. I was now convinced that the issue is GPU related. I ended up swapping out the RT X 2060 that was installed with a beefier RT X 2080 super. Remember. I determined that the PSU wasn't the issue for my case specifically believe it or not. The RT X 2080 super caused the PC to shut down as well, but this time it shut down even faster than it did with the RT X 2060. And here's where my friendly neighborhood disk or moderator enjoyed lemon gave me the idea to test this system with a lower end GPU like an rx 460. I swapped the RT X 2080 super with the rx 460 and after 10 minutes of running the heaven benchmark. I thought I was in the clear and literally right after recording this video clip, the PZ ended up shutting down yet again. This actually gave me a ton of data because the more power-hungry cards like the RT X 2080 super caused the PC to shutdown way faster. With the lower power hungry cards like the rx 460, and with this, we determined that the issue was somehow related to power delivery with the motherboard. The first thing that we brainstormed is that the PCIe wasn't delivering the full amount of wattage to the card, but because of the timing of the PC shutting down depending on the power draw of the graphics card, we thought it may also be a capacitor getting too Hot, I don't have anything in the studio to test the capacitor. It would have been really nice to have like a heat camera, or something like that. So the only thing that I could do is visually check the motherboard and the capacitors to see if anything was out of whack and spoiler alert. I did here's where I discovered that my a i/o water cooler was actually covering two capacitors and part of the V. Rms and this specific, a IO has metal plates which may have actually caused contact with the parts on the motherboard. visits privatephotoviewer 'M not exactly sure if the CPU cooler was physically touching the capacitors in the V RM or maybe you is just completely removing the airflow. But here I determined that I was worth the huge amount of time to remove the AO and just install a simple air cooler for testing this air cooler that I found from thermaltake has the CPU portion of it raised from the rest of the metal fins, which Is exactly what I needed to ensure it wasn't making contact with these poorly positioned capacitors once the new CPU cooler was installed. This took quite some time by the way, to completely add new thermal paste, remove some fans, because there's a cramp micro, ATX case etc, and lo and behold it was put back together. This PC ran perfectly fine and didn't shut down at all. After all this, it's pretty crazy to think that the CPU cooler was the root cause of this issue, combined with the fact that we already tested the CPU temperatures and they were working perfectly fine. I thought by running Cinebench in the beginning and seeing good CPU temperatures that could completely eliminate both the CPU and CPU cooler from the equation, but it ended up being the physical design of the CPU cooler that caused these issues with the motherboard. This was honestly way more in-depth of a troubleshooting guide than I thought it would be. I really just thought that I was gon na end up swapping out a bad power supply, like I said earlier, but yeah. Hopefully this gave you some steps and ideas. If you have to troubleshoot this problem in the future, well that wraps up my troubleshooting guide for a gaming PC shutting down when gaming, as always drop a comment down below about what you thought of this guide or what other steps you would have personally done. 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