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This laptop seems like excellent bang for your buck:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834315423
Kind of wishing I had gotten it when it was in stock, it was even less than 599 I think. But do you think it would make more sense to buy this laptop now or wait until next summer? Would the price realistically drop much by next summer?
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I am having some weird problems with my PC.
It just randomly restarts while playing some games. No BSOD, not shutting down. Just restarting. And it just happens with some games, not all of them, and i can't really find a similarity between those games. It does not restart at the same point in the game, or after the same time played. It can be 30 minutes of gameplay, it can be more than two hours without a restart.
Preliminary google showed me that it is probably either the Power supply, the processor overheating, or the RAM.
I did a few tests, and the processor was indeed overheating. Turns out that the cooler got loose when i moved. So i took it off, cleaned it, new thermal paste, fix again. Now my processor temperatures are fine. But the problem persists.
Next i ran memtest86, and my RAM does not produce any errors.
This leaves my power supply failing from the popular theories (The nominal power values should not be a problem, it is a 750W PSU). Sadly i have no idea how to check whether the power supply is failing.
The weird thing is that this only happens when gaming, and only with some games.
It happened for Civ Beyond Earth, TW: Shogun 2 Fall of the samurai, and WH40K:DoWII.
It did NOT happen in Civ 5, Dark Souls 1 or 2, or any of the lots of different indie games i play.
Any suggestions as to what to do next? Any tests i can run to narrow down the problem? Any other ideas what could be the problem?
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My initial guess was overheating. Maybe your GPU is overheating, not your CPU?
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United Kingdom20158 Posts
This leaves my power supply failing from the popular theories (The nominal power values should not be a problem, it is a 750W PSU). Sadly i have no idea how to check whether the power supply is failing.
Most PSU's are pretty bad quality and the wattage label is not indicative of quality. For random shutdowns and restarts, PSU issues are very high on the list of potential problems
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@Simberto:
I would check on all physical connections in the PC. Something might have bad contact after you transported the PC in your move. Take the graphics card out of its slot and put it back in, pull all cables and plug them back in, remove the RAM and put it back in. For graphics card and RAM sticks, you can try to gently clean the contacts on the card/sticks before plugging them back into their slots.
As you mention that it does not happen with all games, this could be caused by some automatic software update that happened right around the time you moved. You can research what Windows Update did somewhere in its section in the Windows Control Panel. There's a screen that shows what Windows Update installed, and you can sort it by the date column. If you are lucky there's something obvious around the date of your move, like the graphics driver getting updated.
The "Uninstall or change a program" screen in the Windows Control Panel also has a date column. I think that's where programs that updated themselves will record changes, like graphics drivers using their own tool to update instead of waiting on Microsoft with Windows Update.
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about the power supply, your bios should have all the voltages listed somewhere in there; see if they are off of standard V's or if they vary.
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United Kingdom20158 Posts
software voltage displays are too inaccurate/inconsistent to be useful
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So basically, to check if my PSU is still working fine i need a device that costs about half as much as a new PSU? Meh.
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No, those test devices are not for you. They can't predict problems under load. They are more for people where the PC won't boot. Your problem you would research by testing with another PSU.
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Hm, so is there any way to figure out if that is actually the problem without getting a new PSU? I am a bit strapped for cash at the moment, so i'd like to not start randomly exchanging parts of the PC until i get the right one.
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I only know about using a second set of parts, like if you have a nerdy friend with a PC that you could visit for a few hours of experimenting and then connect his PSU to your parts, or swap graphics cards, etc. A big problem about that is that you say you sometimes have to wait two hours for the problem to show up. The experimenting would take forever.
You should try to google for weird problems about the exact PC parts you have. There's for example a weird thing with ASUS motherboards where the board monitors voltages from the PSU and freaks out and shuts off if it thinks there's a problem. Or maybe you can find people reporting problems with the same version of AMD/NVIDIA GPU drivers and your particular GPU.
I just got the idea that it might be the power in your new home. There might be issues with the wiring, or maybe electrical devices in your home or from your neighbours do something to the power, something where your particular PSU then fails to do its job for a moment.
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I still think that before buggering around with the PSU you should check how hot your GPU is running. It's simple to do with software. And as Ropid said, check the internet, because it might be driver related too.
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Thanks a lot for the answers, i will get to checking GPU temps and googling stuff tomorrow when i have a bit more time.
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not exactly a tech support question but I think its pretty close. does lowering the quality of a youtube video affect the sound quality?
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On December 04 2016 10:18 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote: not exactly a tech support question but I think its pretty close. does lowering the quality of a youtube video affect the sound quality?
Not anymore
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Certainly seems like it. If you use a program to download a YT video you'll get a list of quality options to download the video (w/ audio embedded) or with audio by itself. Seems like those quality options would have to be used somewhere or they wouldn't have it.
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On December 04 2016 12:27 Craton wrote:Certainly seems like it. If you use a program to download a YT video you'll get a list of quality options to download the video (w/ audio embedded) or with audio by itself. Seems like those quality options would have to be used somewhere or they wouldn't have it.
Changing the quality on YT videos does not affect audio since 2014, but older/lower quality videos will still have an impact obviously. Just try listening to something at 720p then 144p, it definitely used to sound absolutely terrible on 144p but now i personally can't hear a difference. Again though, older content that was poorly encoded in the first place won't save your ears
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The values in the screenshot were from a video released a few months ago. Can you provide a source about the change?
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The audio you hear during a YouTube video will usually be 126 kbps AAC in an MP4 container or anywhere from 50-165 kbps Opus in a WebM container. Changing video resolution (360p, 720p, etc) in the video settings will probably not impact the audio stream, but it is likely that your connection performance will.
That sounds like audio quality is still variable, it's just not embedded into the video (i.e. lower quality doesn't automatically mean worse audio, but it still can be worse if your connection is poor).
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