Hi,
OK this is going to be long so please bear with me as I've asked for help on at least three other forums with no luck yet and I have a lot of information to include. The best tl;dr version I can offer is that my system restarts while playing some games, some of the time, from a few minutes to a few hours and leaves no evidence / minidump behind that it happened.
I bought a laptop in October 2017 from a Quanta rebadger (CyberPower PC UK) and from early on it crashed playing Fallout 4. I decided it was a Bethesda game being a Bethesda game or a mod. Unfotunately it kept happening but only with Fallout 4 so I linked it to mod issues. I totally reinstalled Fallout 4 and it behaved fine even with more mods than I originally had. Problem solved? No. While playing Subnautica one night I hadn't saved (painful) and the same crash issue meant a lot of lost progress. The screen showed the image frozen as the audio played fine for a few more seconds then became equally stuck before the laptop restarted itself.
I could go on but suffice to say that this has now happened on at least eight games I own to varying degrees even if some crash it more often. Each crash is the same as above and will start with the video locking before the audio gets stuck and loops then it restarts. Despite me checking every setting three or more times and making sure I even had a 21GB pagefile (16GB RAM in the machine) it *never* creates a dumpfile when these restarts happen. It's as if Windows is oblivious to it. I had to use WhoCrashed where I discovered something I didn't know about, Live Kernel Reports, to find a supposed cause. I also took the opportunity to force a crash with the program which did indeed create a minidump so something about the issue stops them being created. The only reason I'm sure this is a BSOD issue is that when I disabled BSOD restarts the system will instead just hang when the problem occurs until I manually power it down.
Things I've tried so far:
Reseating the RAM
Testing both RAM sticks, individually, in each RAM slot
Ran memTest 86 with no errors
Three separate drives (SSD, m.2 SSD, hybrid SATA HDD) with clean Windows installs, Steam, and one game only on them
Installed *only* Windows, Steam and one game that crashes it most often with no peripherals attached
Monitored temps carefully with GPU never going above 70C
At least three separate nVidia driver versions from the one Windows installs to the current one on nVidia's site
Probably other things that I'm forgetting now and will add later
To make this issue more problematic to troubleshoot I've used Oculus Rift with it for many hours and not yet had a single instance of this crash / restart issue. I can also run a stress test benchmark (FurMark) for hours without a single issue and I will add that it has only ever happened while gaming. Yet the moment I play one of these games I feel like I'm playing a game of Russian Roulette where it's only a matter of time before it restarts. It can't be heat related because as I mentioned it can happen literally as I land at the title screen which is less than four minutes or go for hours without an issue.
The games that it has crashed on so far are Fallout 4, Subnautica, Destiny 2, TERA, WWE 2K18, Deux Ex: Mankind Divided, Borderlands 2, and Deep Rock Galactic. These can play fine for minutes to hours at a time with no issue so I don't always see it with all these games but WWE 2K18 I can almost guarantee a crash within 5 minutes. Even that, though, can play for a few hours (rarely) without crashing. I'll also add that each time I've formatted and reinstalled Windows the games seem to run without issues until after a reboot. The last clean install I tried was Wednesday / yesterday and it was fine. I shut the system down because I had to go out but when I came back I checked and within 10 minutes it restarted. I've also made it crash again just now so I have a comparison Live Kernel dump.
I have been in contact with the retailer trying to find a cause but after three days of troubleshooting and doing things I still had nothing. Only when I sent the Live Kernel dumps did they collect the laptop to check it out. Unfortunately, after 2 1/2 weeks they found zero issues and in the return note it mentions they ran FurMark for 140 hours with no problem. If that's all they did then I can see why they found no issues even after I linked them to a video of the crash happening. The result of them finding no issue is that they can't send it to the manufacturer for repair as it will be returned to them as no fault found.
If you made it this far I will say thank you for that alone. If you can help me pinpoint the cause and give me something to hurl at the retailer to make them fix this issue I would be eternally grateful. I'm attaching all information requested in the BSOD posting as well as a GPU-Z image, CPU-Z file, and the two Live Kernel crash dumps.
All I want is a working laptop and right now all I have is an expensive paperweight. I can play these games on an older system with a GT740m without any issue although at a much lower detail and with varying degrees of slowdown. Please help me if you can.
OK this is going to be long so please bear with me as I've asked for help on at least three other forums with no luck yet and I have a lot of information to include. The best tl;dr version I can offer is that my system restarts while playing some games, some of the time, from a few minutes to a few hours and leaves no evidence / minidump behind that it happened.
I bought a laptop in October 2017 from a Quanta rebadger (CyberPower PC UK) and from early on it crashed playing Fallout 4. I decided it was a Bethesda game being a Bethesda game or a mod. Unfotunately it kept happening but only with Fallout 4 so I linked it to mod issues. I totally reinstalled Fallout 4 and it behaved fine even with more mods than I originally had. Problem solved? No. While playing Subnautica one night I hadn't saved (painful) and the same crash issue meant a lot of lost progress. The screen showed the image frozen as the audio played fine for a few more seconds then became equally stuck before the laptop restarted itself.
I could go on but suffice to say that this has now happened on at least eight games I own to varying degrees even if some crash it more often. Each crash is the same as above and will start with the video locking before the audio gets stuck and loops then it restarts. Despite me checking every setting three or more times and making sure I even had a 21GB pagefile (16GB RAM in the machine) it *never* creates a dumpfile when these restarts happen. It's as if Windows is oblivious to it. I had to use WhoCrashed where I discovered something I didn't know about, Live Kernel Reports, to find a supposed cause. I also took the opportunity to force a crash with the program which did indeed create a minidump so something about the issue stops them being created. The only reason I'm sure this is a BSOD issue is that when I disabled BSOD restarts the system will instead just hang when the problem occurs until I manually power it down.
Things I've tried so far:
Reseating the RAM
Testing both RAM sticks, individually, in each RAM slot
Ran memTest 86 with no errors
Three separate drives (SSD, m.2 SSD, hybrid SATA HDD) with clean Windows installs, Steam, and one game only on them
Installed *only* Windows, Steam and one game that crashes it most often with no peripherals attached
Monitored temps carefully with GPU never going above 70C
At least three separate nVidia driver versions from the one Windows installs to the current one on nVidia's site
Probably other things that I'm forgetting now and will add later
To make this issue more problematic to troubleshoot I've used Oculus Rift with it for many hours and not yet had a single instance of this crash / restart issue. I can also run a stress test benchmark (FurMark) for hours without a single issue and I will add that it has only ever happened while gaming. Yet the moment I play one of these games I feel like I'm playing a game of Russian Roulette where it's only a matter of time before it restarts. It can't be heat related because as I mentioned it can happen literally as I land at the title screen which is less than four minutes or go for hours without an issue.
The games that it has crashed on so far are Fallout 4, Subnautica, Destiny 2, TERA, WWE 2K18, Deux Ex: Mankind Divided, Borderlands 2, and Deep Rock Galactic. These can play fine for minutes to hours at a time with no issue so I don't always see it with all these games but WWE 2K18 I can almost guarantee a crash within 5 minutes. Even that, though, can play for a few hours (rarely) without crashing. I'll also add that each time I've formatted and reinstalled Windows the games seem to run without issues until after a reboot. The last clean install I tried was Wednesday / yesterday and it was fine. I shut the system down because I had to go out but when I came back I checked and within 10 minutes it restarted. I've also made it crash again just now so I have a comparison Live Kernel dump.
I have been in contact with the retailer trying to find a cause but after three days of troubleshooting and doing things I still had nothing. Only when I sent the Live Kernel dumps did they collect the laptop to check it out. Unfortunately, after 2 1/2 weeks they found zero issues and in the return note it mentions they ran FurMark for 140 hours with no problem. If that's all they did then I can see why they found no issues even after I linked them to a video of the crash happening. The result of them finding no issue is that they can't send it to the manufacturer for repair as it will be returned to them as no fault found.
If you made it this far I will say thank you for that alone. If you can help me pinpoint the cause and give me something to hurl at the retailer to make them fix this issue I would be eternally grateful. I'm attaching all information requested in the BSOD posting as well as a GPU-Z image, CPU-Z file, and the two Live Kernel crash dumps.
All I want is a working laptop and right now all I have is an expensive paperweight. I can play these games on an older system with a GT740m without any issue although at a much lower detail and with varying degrees of slowdown. Please help me if you can.
