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My computer started crashing a few months ago, but it's only occurring during gaming, usually after about 5 minutes of gaming. When it crashes, I cannot immediately press the power button again to turn it on. Instead, I have to disconnect the power cable from the power supply, wait about 15 seconds, and then I can start it again. I needed a video card upgrade anyways, so last night, I went out and bought a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti. After installing it, I believed my problem to be fixed as I played "Life is Strange" for about 3 hours with no issues. Today I'm at work, and my wife tells me that after an hour of gaming, the computer crashed again.

My build looks like this: Motherboard: M4A79XTD Evo Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 GPU:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti I'm dual booting Windows 7 and Linux.

Given the way that I have to disconnect power to the power supply before I can start it again, I'm assuming that the power supply is failing. Would that be a safe assumption?

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    Sounds like maybe a temperature issue? Have you looked at any of your temps?
    – Austin
    Aug 4, 2015 at 16:42
  • I'll check again tonight. Do you have a resource for which temps to check and what range is acceptable? Are you just referring to core temp?
    – KinsDotNet
    Aug 4, 2015 at 16:44
  • Does the event viewer log anything? Have your turned off "auto reboot" for blue screens?
    – Yorik
    Aug 4, 2015 at 16:52
  • I'm making sure it's disabled now. There are no system events in the event viewer except when it's coming back up I see the "Previous shutdown was unexpected" messages.
    – KinsDotNet
    Aug 4, 2015 at 16:56
  • I disabled auto reboot for blue screens, and it's still crashing without blue-screening
    – KinsDotNet
    Aug 4, 2015 at 17:05

1 Answer 1

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This sounds like a textbook case of an overloaded power supply to me. It could be high temperature but I doubt it given the unusual requirement of unplugging it from the wall to turn it back on.

Pursuing the power supply (PSU) problem would be my suggestion. It's important to understand that many power supplies have multiple rails, this just means the PSU can only supply a certain amount of power down a single cable of the PSU. It's very possible that your graphics card is drawing more power on the 12V rail than the PSU can supply.

Multiple rail PSUs can be annoying because the computer might only draw 300W but if 200W of that are from one cable the power supply can still fail.

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