# Laptop suddenly powers off and restarts itself when I play most games.



## sky11 (Mar 13, 2013)

Hi, I hope this is the correct area to post this. Games are what trigger the problem, though I suspect it is a hardware issue so please let me know if I should repost it somewhere else. 

Basically, yesterday I was playing Hearthstone and my computer suddenly went black (as if there was no battery and someone pulled the plug) and then restarted in a few seconds. I actually thought it was a brief power outage in my building (silly because my battery was in at the time).

Anyway it happened again a bit later when I tried to play World of Tanks, and I also tried Eve Online and Team Fortress 2, both caused the same issue, though after different amounts of time. Eve Online ran for a good 15-20 minutes before it happened. World of Tanks and TF2 make it happen within a matter of seconds of joining a game (garage/menu don't cause it). Hearthstone doesn't seem to make it happen every time, I've completed numerous games without issue but as I said the first time I saw this issue it was with Hearthstone. The only other game I've tried is Hammerfight which is a pretty low-intensity old thing, and it did not cause the crash. All these games are things I've played regularly for months and I haven't changed the graphics settings.

It's never happened while not playing a game. I can watch videos and surf the web and use non-game programs without issue, although I haven't tried anything super intense like video or model rendering. 

My computer is an MSI GT780DXR notebook
Intel Core i7-2670QM CPU
NVIDIA GTX 570M/ 3GB GDDR5 GPU
DDRIII 12GB(4GB*3) RAM
1TB (500GB*2 RAID 0) 7200RPM HDD

I got it in January of 2012 so it's over 2 years old and I have been gaming on it pretty hard over that time. 

I did update to the latest GPU drivers with no change. 

Most google searches indicate a heat issue so I got some heat monitoring/stress testing programs to try on the CPU and GPU. My CPU cores rest at 40-50 C and when I did a stress test (Prime95) they ran at 100% and got up to 90 C for a while but the crash did not happen. 

I set up logging of my GPU temperature (using GPU-Z/FurMark) so that I could watch it as I play games and have a record of where it was at when the crash happens. My GPU rests in the 50 C range with the computer on for a while. After using the computer a while I played a game of Hearthstone, during which my GPU reached temps of 78 C but the crash did not occur. I then tried to play World of Tanks and the crash occurred quickly with GPU temps of only 76 C. I tried World of Tanks again later after the computer had been off for some hours, and my GPU only reached 51 C but the crash happened within seconds of entering a battle. 

These results make me think it's not a heat issue. My fans seem to be working fine and I also opened up the back and blew out the dust, there wasn't a lot. It didn't seem to affect the problem. 

I ran the windows memory diagnostic thingy that shows up when I press F2 on boot, it didn't indicate any problems. 

I wonder if it is a power or battery issue? Could the GPU be demanding power and not receiving it in some situations that happen quickly in more graphically complex games like World of Tanks and TF2 but may be less likely to happen in something like Hearthstone? 

Hopefully this means something to someone here. There is a good laptop repair place nearby but they want to keep my machine for up to 3 days to run diagnostic tests on it and figure out the problem but I am really going to have a hard time being without it for that long when I have schoolwork to do as well, not to mention I really don't want to have to go thru and make all my websites and games and services forget my passwords as I am a little paranoid about random people having free run on my machine. 

Anyway if anyone has some ideas of tests I can do myself or anything to help narrow down what the problem is I would be grateful! I didn't actually do an intense GPU stress test yet as I was a little paranoid about harming something if indeed it is malfunctioning. Would anyone recommend I try it? Based on what I saw while playing games I guess it doesn't sound like I need to worry about temperature too much yet. 

Look forward to hearing some opinions, thanks very much!


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## sky11 (Mar 13, 2013)

I did end up doing a FurMark stress test on the GPU, it did cause a crash after about a minute but the temperature was just at 71 C. Here's a log of various attributes as the test occurred: http://pastebin.com/abZjAmGV . It's hard to look at, but i started the test at line 270 and the end is when the crash occurred.


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## sky11 (Mar 13, 2013)

Oh, well i made it shutdown again (wanted to try after a system restore to before the problem) and this time it did not come back and i get no response at all when i press the power button =/.


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## Super-D-38 (Apr 25, 2002)

Your plugged into AC power when gaming right? ... If so pay close attention to the power brick and any battery drain. If your battery is failing or not charging fully anymore it may simply be losing the required amount of power and shutting off.
Like my laptop battery is old and not holding a charge, shows full but depletes in like 20 min instead of the 2 hours when new. So if the AC adapter wasn't working fully and the weak battery the system could be starving for power. 

Could be a failing GPU. Rendering a game takes more effort and different "engines" than showing a video. 
If your GPU is failing in say 3d rendering it could cause a crash and reboot. 

You can try setting windows to not reboot on crash and see if you get a BSOD or an error message. 

Also couldn't hurt to check for dust buildup inside on the heatsinks and fans. Overheating can happen quick and trip a reboot before the monitor software reads the change. 

The driver update.. You did a "clean install" right? removed the old ones first? That is just to maybe eliminate a courupt or bad driver. 

These are all idea and guesses, so there could be another issue we just haven't thought of yet.


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## sky11 (Mar 13, 2013)

Super-D-38 said:


> Your plugged into AC power when gaming right? ... If so pay close attention to the power brick and any battery drain. If your battery is failing or not charging fully anymore it may simply be losing the required amount of power and shutting off.
> Like my laptop battery is old and not holding a charge, shows full but depletes in like 20 min instead of the 2 hours when new. So if the AC adapter wasn't working fully and the weak battery the system could be starving for power.
> 
> Could be a failing GPU. Rendering a game takes more effort and different "engines" than showing a video.
> ...


Yes it was always plugged in whilst gaming, and my battery was still relatively healthy, I didn't use it much since it's not the most portable laptop. It still would last for a few hours if I needed to unplug.

There was a little dust which I blew out of there to no avail.

I did not clean install the drivers but the issue did not start after a driver installation, a driver update merely didn't fix it, so I don't think a bad driver installation is a likely cause but I will keep this in mind when installing drivers in the future.

It may be an aspect of the GPU failing like you say. I hope (for the sake of hardware repair/replacement costs) that it isn't the case. I like to think that if it were a GPU issue then that wouldn't make the computer not start at all, especially since there is an integrated video card in there as well that should be sufficient to handle anything that isn't an intensive game. Although perhaps I damaged something else by causing it to hard-shutdown/restart so many times?

Thanks for the suggestions.

In any case I should hear back about the laptop repair place's inspection of it soon to see what the issue is.



Anderson24 said:


> Your laptop may be quite old and can not able to play high resources games. Newly build games consume many resources ram and vga cards. I was also facing the same issue but i change the pc after that.


Yes is it a couple years old but as I said, with the exception of Hearthstone (which isn't high-consumption) all the games I've been playing are thing I have been playing for several years already on the same graphics settings. So it's not just an issue of me trying to play fancy new games with old hardware that can't handle them. I've never managed to use my 12 gigs of ram.

Hell I've been playing the same games on my Surface Pro in the meantime. (albeit with bare minimum graphics settings)


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## Super-D-38 (Apr 25, 2002)

Some times if the system is tripped by an over heat it can take a bit to recover. It may need to sit for a while and won't start back up right away. 

Did anything else update right before it started? If something updated or changed a driver it could have corrupted one. 

But, since you sent it off we just wait.  Do post any results as it may help someone in the future.


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## sky11 (Mar 13, 2013)

Super-D-38 said:


> Some times if the system is tripped by an over heat it can take a bit to recover. It may need to sit for a while and won't start back up right away.
> 
> Did anything else update right before it started? If something updated or changed a driver it could have corrupted one.
> 
> But, since you sent it off we just wait.  Do post any results as it may help someone in the future.


I don't think anything else updated. I did install a piece of software the morning the issue started ( http://distance.software.informer.com/6.0/ ) but I did try a system restore to before that was installed and still had the issue.

I did notice sometimes, when I would carry the laptop to school or somewhere, sometimes after carrying it and turning it on the fan would make a louder noise, but different from the getting-louder-because-i'm-hot noise. I figured it must be dust shifting when the laptop gets carried around and then maybe being moved out of the way by the fan again when started up. I did carry the laptop to school and back the day the issue started so I wondered maybe the dust shifted and caused a heating issue this time, but I did open it an clear the dust (there wasn't a lot), and also monitored CPU/GPU temps and got nothing excessively high before and after clearing the dust (before it stopped turning on entirely).

Also after it did black out for good, it did sit overnight and much of the next day and still wouldn't come on, _then_ I took it to the repair place for inspection, so I don't think it's a temporary thing that needed time to recover.

But yeah we'll see what they have to say, I'll post results when I get them.


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## sky11 (Mar 13, 2013)

Well got the news that the video card failed, didn't get more details than that though. They kept it a couple more days to determine if it was possible to repair which wouldn't have been too expensive, but it doesn't look like it will be, and trying to replace it will probably be prohibitively expensive to the point where i should just look into a new machine.

Still curious why the system can't start without the graphics card when it has an integrated card as well, but I'll ask about those details when I go pick up my brick tomorrow.


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