Hello all,

I had a surprising shutdown last night while using Skyrim to check a couple new mods (Realistic Lighting Overhaul and Real Water Two). It wasn't a CTD, but an actual shutdown of the hardware. I had to press the power button to restart. There were no error messages and Windows 10 didn't complain about the event. I've read this can be caused by a failing power supply or an overheating CPU. My machine is brand new - built just a few weeks ago. I can provide the specs as needed, but shy of that, any suggestions for how I can diagnose the event on my own would be welcome!

Many thanks.

EDIT - meh, here's the spec:

CPU: Intel Core i3-6320 Skylake Dual-Core 3.9 GHz LGA 1151 65W BX80662I36320 Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 530

Graphics Card: MSI Radeon R9 390X DirectX 12 R9 390X GAMING 8G 8GB 512-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support ATX

SSD: SAMSUNG 850 EVO 2.5" 1TB SATA III MZ-75E1T0B/AM

OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2133 (PC4 17000) Intel Z170 Platform / Intel X99 Platform Desktop Memory Model F4-2133C15D-32GVR

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-H170-D3HP LGA 1151 Intel H170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Power Supply: SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold (SS-650KM Active PFC F3) 650W ATX12V V2.3/EPS 12V V2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Full Modular Active PFC Power Supply New 4th Gen CPU Certified Hasw

well, specs or a dxdiag would help



when you built it, are you sure you applied the right amount of thermal paste between the CPU and heatsink?

It could be what you are suggesting.

Where is the tower located. Possibly it could be generating too much heat if the unit is not getting enough air for the intakes and enough space for the out going air. A lot of people do like to put the towers inside an Entertainment unit or in an enclosed shelf on the computer desk either on top or underneath and that is one of the worst decisions when dealing with a gaming PC.

Did you open up the unit and see if there might be something blocking the air vents, Normally this should not be an issue after a couple of weeks but if you do have pets especially cats sometimes they like rub their bodies against the vents so it is easy for fur to get trapped. Dogs do not do that but quite often this is the season when dogs do like to shed the winter fur if you have a breed that has heavy fur.

Also the suggestion that funnybunny gave with the thermal paste is a good one.

Did the PC shut down at any other time or did you notice anything else on the PC or in the house like lights dimming for a brief second. I would just keep an eye on the system and not worry too much if it was just the one time. If it happens again then we might need to try out other outlets and possibly reset the BIOS on your computer and maybe even check if there is an update for it.

The physical build was performed by a friend with more than a decade of experience doing this type of work. I saw him apply many drops of thermal paste to the CPU and then spread it evenly with the edge of a plastic card. It looked very, very uniform.

The tower is out in the open, up high on a stand. This helps isolate it from ground level dust and gives it lots of free air for circulation. There's no appreciable accumulation of dust on the vents. I did not notice power fluctuations but the unit is plugged into a USP so it should be protected. When it shut down, I felt the vents. There was warmth, but not an obvious difference from previous sessions. Definitely warmer, but not 'hot'.

This is the first time this has happened but the software is still configured the same so I can try to reproduce it.

It could possibly be the mods if they are pushing the system to the limit but based on the information you gave your system should be able to handle most games out there with ease even using mods (Stability is another thing but usually mods will for the most part just crash to desktop or you get an error message within the game)

Possibly if you are using an ENB it might not be working correctly with the card drivers and I wonder if that could cause the system to shut down.

Shut Down is the last resort to protect the system from damage and with OS's since XP usually the shut down is caused by hardware not not working correctly or trying to access something that it is not supposed to like a memory range or accessing a part of the Kernel the driver is not supposed to access. When that happens the PC will likely shut down. The Kernel is the core of the operating system and for the most part today only a few things has access to it so if a program crashes it crashes to the desktop in the old days that crash could possibly cause a restart or shut down (Windows ME was known for doing this a lot)

Nope, don't have an ENB set up yet. That's kind of big task if you are brand new to using mods. I did look at Climates of Tamriel but haven't actually downloaded it yet.

I'm gonna see if there are any logs in the BIOS software I can check for clues.

CoT is REALLY great, Kami. Practically foolproof for setup, and makes the game so much more REAL.... So after you get this current thing all sorted, I'd give a thumbs-up x 1k for trying it.

Check the event viewer logs. Any information about an unexpected shutdown? The power just cut off suddenly? Look at the system logs under Windows logs folder.

Use the date and time of the shutdown.

What other games do you play? How long where you playing Skyrim? Monitor your system temperatures. Try HWmonitor. http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

Have you stress tested the system? Are you overclocking/overvolting anything?

Post a dxdiag: http://help.ea.com/en/article/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

Use spoiler tags. In the edit Window, click the button to the immediate left of the Font dropdown box. The special bbcode button.

Select spoiler from the dropdown and paste the entire report in the textbox.

If that's the first time, just monitor how frequently do you get shutdowns. It could be a coincidence for whatever reason.

Even so, check the processor heat sink to make sure it is properly seated!

Open your case (just leave it open for a while) and examine that all fans are running.

Most computers today are designed to turn off (automatically) if some components are overheating.

Also examine if the the power supply gets very hot quickly (by touching it carefully)

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It wouldn't harm to monitor you temps as well. Jasper posted the link above!

Since you got someone to build it for you perhaps you could ask him to run over it for you reseat the gfx card, memory sticks, cables etc. No event logs of any kind suggests a hardware issue rather than a windows error.

Hi jasper1979, I'll look through the event viewer logs and the system logs. I didn't know to check these, so thanks. I tried to see if the bios had any clues but there's no logging or messaging information that I could find at that level.

I'll try the dxdiag post.

I checked for utilities which help monitor system info such as temp and found references to HWmonitor. I'll install it next though I hope the logs will prove definitive.

I've been playing Skyrim for several years, but it's only been a few weeks since I started playing on this PC. Skyrim is the only game I play on this machine. The machine hasn't been stress tested though I did maintain the configuration which was in place at the time of the shutdown in an effort to reproduce the problem. I tried to follow the same series of actions (a combination entering/exiting cells, FT etc.) but the machine didn't flinch. I'm not overclocking and there was no obvious power issue at the time of the shutdown.

I use HWMonitor, kami. It's a really slick little app, takes almost no resources, and provides TONS of good info. Highly recommend it.

Sounds good, thanks! I'll be pretty busy for the rest of this week so I won't have any updates for a little while, but I've got some good solutions to explore.

Thanks for the tips; so far, just the one instance. I'll try opening the case and checking the power source for overheating. That's easy enough!