Guild Wars 2

About a month ago I made a post on the bugs/support side of the forums. I was having issues with computer restarts that would only occur while playing GW2. I thought it was the client somehow causing issues. A patch shortly thereafter seemed to have fix it, but the issues returned within a few days. I ended up replacing components on my system and eventually determined that it was a problem with my power supply.

So just a heads up for those of you who are not extremely versed on computer troubleshooting (I’m an amateur at best): If you are running an application that is somewhat taxing on your CPU or GPU and your computer seems to shut itself off (no blue screen of death or error messages) and restart, it is likely that your power supply is faulty and cannot handle the fluctuating voltages for the CPU/GPU from running the application.

Yes I know, it should have been more obvious, but hey I don’t get paid to troubleshoot my own system.

Yeah, I got a new case with a bottom mounted power supply. I didn’t know how bad pet fur and dander could build up. My pc started shutting down while playing and I wasn’t sure what was going on. Turns out the fan for the power supply was almost completely covered. Cleaned it out and blew out my pc case for good measure and don’t have problems anymore.

Random restarts can also be from CPU over heating.

As someone who has professionally been responsible for keeping thousands of computers running I can tell you if you are having hardware issues, it’s usually the power supply or a hard drive. I would bet you money any day of the week that most pc technicians at large companies and institutions do more hard drive and PSU replacing than anything else, hardware wise.

Not only faulty, but kittenty as well. Many, many people buy gaming systems and decide to save money on stuff like the PSU, because 600W is 600W right? Wrong. There is a huge difference between quality made PSUs and cheap china stuff. The PSU is one of the most important components in any system.

Same thing if the CPU is overheating. Every time someone says they are using the stock cooler because its “good enough” I loose hope in the future of mankind.

I’d like to point out that it also could be an unstable factory overclock on the graphics card.

When I built my system a few years ago, I bought a factory-overclocked 660Ti. Worked awesome for the games I was playing at the time, then GW2 came out and I started getting the sudden restart issue mentioned by the OP — only when playing GW2. Did some research and found out that sometimes a factory overclock can result in an unstable GPU and your best bet is to go in and underclock the card back to original settings. I downloaded MSI Afterburner, punched up the power limit percentage and cranked down the memory clock closer to core specs for the 660Ti, and no more restart problem.

Dawdler.8521:

Not only faulty, but kittenty as well. Many, many people buy gaming systems and decide to save money on stuff like the PSU, because 600W is 600W right? Wrong. There is a huge difference between quality made PSUs and cheap china stuff. The PSU is one of the most important components in any system.

Same thing if the CPU is overheating. Every time someone says they are using the stock cooler because its “good enough” I loose hope in the future of mankind.

Yeah, breaks my heart to hear people plan on skimping on the power supply because it’s a “non-vital” component. DX

Never ever skimp on the power unit. It doesn’t have to be 3000w, but for goodness sake buy a good quality one.