Guild Wars 2

Hello, I’ve been having this issue since the start but I haven’t been playing a lot lately so I thought it went away but it happened again.

Basically what happens is after prolonged session of playing my PC freezes, I can hear the sound in the background but all control is lost, I can’t alt tab, pause it(with keyboard key) or anything, my monitor goes on standby like PC was off.
I thought this was overheating issue since I also get artifacts that come and go all over screen but I’ve been monitoring my temp and it doesn’t go over 80, maybe up to 90 at most.
I also play a lot of games and this has NEVER happened before even in games that are much more taxing and I played them for long periods of time.

My configuration is:
Intel Q9450 @ 3.2 ghz
ATI 4870×2
4GB DDR2
etc
I cleaned the PC case, graphics card and everything I could think of but nothing helped.
Latest drivers, cap etc.

Nolimit.8417:

Hello, I’ve been having this issue since the start but I haven’t been playing a lot lately so I thought it went away but it happened again.

Basically what happens is after prolonged session of playing my PC freezes, I can hear the sound in the background but all control is lost, I can’t alt tab, pause it(with keyboard key) or anything, my monitor goes on standby like PC was off.
I thought this was overheating issue since I also get artifacts that come and go all over screen but I’ve been monitoring my temp and it doesn’t go over 80, maybe up to 90 at most.
I also play a lot of games and this has NEVER happened before even in games that are much more taxing and I played them for long periods of time.

My configuration is:
Intel Q9450 @ 3.2 ghz
ATI 4870×2
4GB DDR2
etc
I cleaned the PC case, graphics card and everything I could think of but nothing helped.
Latest drivers, cap etc.

Sounds like you have a card going bad. Remove one card and play if it hapens again remove it and install the other.

It’s 1 card tho, 2 cores and I don’t have any other to test.
Problem is, like few weeks ago when Dishonored came out I got it and played the !@#$ out of that game, finished fast and never had as much as a stutter.

I do want to build a new PC but that’s not going to happen this year or who knows when, I always feel like new thing is right around the corner and I’ll screw up if I upgrade now(like DDR4 so mobo won’t be compatible or new VGA/CPU line etc etc). So far very few games exist that I can’t run on max(and that I’m interested in).
Bf3, witcher2 and few others but that’s besides the point.
Maybe I should borrow someone’s card to test and just do small upgrade but I wanna be sure it’s some fatal issue with card before buying new one because I really don’t have much money to spend now.

I would suspect that something on the 4870 card is failing and causing your grief. I used to have a 4870 (single GPU) card and it would overheat in some games, but not others. It just depends on what parts of the card the game’s features use the hardest.

In my case, the GPU wasn’t getting close to overheating. I had a Zalman GPU cooler which kept the GPU running at 72 F (or less) in every game. Unfortunately, the GPU cooler wasn’t able to cool the back end of the board, where the power connectors were. That left the voltage regulators and a few other heat-sensitive components vulnerable to overheating, so they did. I would suspect that you’re seeing something similar. Perhaps something in the power circuitry or in the VRAM is getting too hot and crashing the card and the PC.

You might be able to get some more information on whether or not the board is crashing by looking at the card after your computer locks up (but before you reboot it). Most of the 4870 cards that are based on the reference design have some diagnostic LEDs on them that light up AFTER the board crashes. (they’re nearly invisible when they’re not lit up, though) If you have them, seeing what light is lit will tell you the card’s best guess at why it crashed.

You can try bumping up the cooling fan speed to see if that will help keep more of the board cool, or if you can find an extra fan to blow on the back end of the card it might help. Another thing to try, if you haven’t already, is to use v-sync or another framerate limiter to prevent the card from doing “too much” work. This should lower the power draw of the card and the heat generated by the card. It may not be a long-term solution, but it might help you troubleshoot things if you can find a framerate that makes the card stable.

Could be, for a while now fan on it started making weird loud noise, I think it might have moved a bit and sometimes it stops sometimes it gets louder but it still works just makes weird noise. Not like it’s scraping or caught on something but I can’t really explain it.

I will run hwmonitor whole day and make it log stuff so hopefully it will have info at point of crash. I did notice some things were hot in there so you might be exactly right.

I’ll open the case and look for the light, we’ll see. Can you tell me if it’s on bottom side where fan is and case cover(is it under case maybe? I tried opening it before but didn’t want to come off so I decided not to force it) or on top?

As for the fan speed, it’s always at 100% when I play, I control it manually because on auto it works stupidly, stuck at 27% all the time until very high temp when it does big burst then slows down and back again. When I don’t game it’s 60-70% because idle temp even then is in 40s or 50s depending on how long PC was on.
Think I have v sync on but don’t think it makes any difference since I have bad FPS in game anyway.

Oh and my temps were in celsius by the way.

The LEDs should be on the back of the graphics card, or they were on mine, at least. They were easy to see, when they were lit. It’s amazing how bright they were.

Opened it and changed thermal paste and cleaned it inside, but temp didn’t seem to go down so that’s not the issue… I’ll check if problem comes back when I have time to play, busy week next week

Nolimit.8417:

Opened it and changed thermal paste and cleaned it inside, but temp didn’t seem to go down so that’s not the issue… I’ll check if problem comes back when I have time to play, busy week next week

Have you tried running the game with your processor at default clockspeeds?

That’s what ncsoft support recommended and I’ll try it next. But as I said before very busy now because next week is full of exams etc.

One thing I learned harshly in the past, never 100% your fan speed. 2 video cards (5870 and previous HIS turbo 4870 died from simply the fan dying and fried the cards. On nvidia inspector, the program doesnt even allow me to (80% max) any more so I can’t get my evil temtation to overclock like a mad man and keep cool while doing so.

You could look on frozencpu.com (where i get all my watercooling stuff) and see if they have replacement or upgrade cooler for your gpu. Shouldnt cost you a new gpu or if it is even your gpu dying instead (unlikelyif you run bf3 no prob at max) or just get a cheap replacement card for 180-250 dollars if anything.

Just sending out some advice and my 2 cents about a fix if it even is fans instead of another part going bad.

Good luck!