For a little over a week now I have been having an issue where some games rendered using DirectX have been crashing after a small period of time. Usually the result is similar to an immediate system shutdown but with the lights still on and fans still blowing.
GuildWars 2 and Space Engineers are the two primary games the crash occurs in. Since finding out the crash occurs in more than one game I have thoroughly checked for heat issues leading up to the time of the crash using both hardware monitors and my own hand to see if it is overheating and I can safely conclude it is not.
Suspecting the PSU, I have used a multimeter to detect the voltage being supplied to the video card 6-pin power, as well as a molex connector on a different rail. The 6-pin video card power connectors showed 12.4v. The 5v power on the molex connector showed exactly 5v. I do not appear to have a dying power supply.
I have downloaded some benchmark tools to see how reproducible the crash is. Furmark 1.13.0, Unigine Heaven 4.0, and Unigine Valley 1.0 are the benchmark tools I have used for this. I have ran Furmark for over 30 minutes with GPU load sustained at 99%-100% the entire time and wasn't able to produce a crash.
Next I moved on to Unigine Heaven benchmark with resolution at 1920x1080, quality at Ultra, and DirectX11 as the renderer. The test lasted the expected ~6 minutes before crashing. If I set the quality to high instead this benchmark doesn't appear to crash after ~15 minutes regardless of renderer. Unigine Valley benchmark I couldn't get to crash on high or ultra settings, at 1920x1080 resolution, and DX9, DX11, or OpenGL renderer.
I have also attempted to load up much older games to see if I could find any more patterns. I was successfully able to play Unreal Tournament (original) and Unreal Tournament 2004 for over 30 minutes each with no issues. I also launched Halo PC and was able to play that for over an hour, again with no issues.
Suspecting a faulty DirectX install I attempted look at DirectX Diagnostic tool to see if it was reporting any issues, but there were none reported. I attempted to install DirectX but it reported that I already have the newest version. I attempted to alter the DirectX version registry key on my system to trick it into installing anyway, but it still insisted I had the newest version. I have also already installed the newest graphics driver for my video card. I used the cleaning utility from AMD, and rolling back what remains until I saw a Microsoft provided driver in device manager to ensure a clean install.
Most recently I have also attempted to reduce the graphics settings to low in GuildWars 2 and Space Engineers hoping the crash could be worked around until a more permanent solution could be found. However doing so made zero impact on the crash behavior.
Where do I go from here?
- Processor: AMD Phenom II x4 965
- RAM: 16GB
- Video Card: Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB
- Video Driver: 13.251.0.0 dated 12/6/2013
- Power Supply: Raidmax Quantum RX-700 700w ATX12V V2.2
- OS: Windows Vista 64-bit with SP2