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General discussion

PC Randomly Reboots - Any Help Appreciated

Apr 26, 2020 10:36AM PDT

Hey guys,

I built my pc in April of 2016 with the following specs: i5 4460, gtx 960, asrock h97 anniversary, 8GB ram, evga supernova 650 gs, pny cs1311 ssd

And I don't know if this is relevant, but I actually had an issue with random, huge fps drops while gaming, like a week or two after putting the build together, back 4 years ago. A game would be running at 100 FPS and all of a sudden drop to a constant 5-10. At the time, I had the newest graphics driver installed and apparently downgrading to 347.52 fixed it (looking at an old post of mine). After that though, my pc had been running fine for years, up until maybe 6 months ago. I don't really remember if I kept the graphics driver the same for that long, but I've tried downgrading back to 347.52 and keeping up to date with the newest drivers, and get the same reboots with both.

It doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing for these crashes to occur, whether I'm just doing some light browsing or gaming. My PC will randomly freeze and then either reboot on its own or sometimes it just stays frozen until I manually reboot. It could go 2 or 3 days without any crashes, or crash 5+ times a day. No BSOD. Event Viewer just shows Kernel-Power 41.

Something else I've noticed that may or may not be related is, every once in a while when I start up my pc, my monitor won't display anything but my pc otherwise starts up as normal. This doesn't happen nearly as often as the random reboots - maybe a couple times a month.

I've eliminated my hdd and cd drive from system, no errors from memtest after 10 passes, pc is quite clean inside and temps seem fine, tried a clean install of win10, tried reseating ram and gpu, tried unplugging cables and connecting them again, I'm just trying my ram in different slots now.

Do you guys have any other suggestions that I can try? It could very likely be my PSU dying and I'm not sure if I could borrow another one to test that, so I just want to try all other possible options first.

Thanks a lot Happy

Discussion is locked

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I'm seeing a lot of GPU failures.
Apr 26, 2020 10:38AM PDT

Since this build has the i5 w/graphics unplug the old 960 and test without for a while. Even my son's gtx 970 failed recently. It's a common sight now.

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Thank you
Apr 27, 2020 12:05PM PDT

Appreciate the response! I'm gonna give that a try.