Has anyone heard of fallout 4 causing an entire system to crash?

[Lansat]

I've been playing fallout 4 on this fairly new pc (Windows 10 6600k gtx 1070 with 372.70 drivers) and it's been problem free up until yesterday when i started to get this unusual problem. My fps will go from it's normal 60 fps to 10 fps with this horrible audio distortion but it will somehow fix itself if i alt tab, wait a second or two and then go back into game. If i don't alt tab and just let it lag it will eventually freeze the whole pc. Windows event log shows a bugcheck STOP: 0x00000119 VIDEO_SCHEDULER_INTERNAL_ERROR. I tried a clean install of a older driver 368.39 but the only difference is instead of lagging and giving me time to alt-tab it just goes straight to the BSOD with the same bugcheck message.

 

I ran the benchmark in the EVGA OC Scanner played Deus Ex Mankind Divided for about half an hour with neither of those things causing a single hiccup, which makes me start to wonder if it's either that neither of those things are stressing out the card enough or if it's even possible for a specific video game to crash the entire pc?

 

Maybe it's because my install of fallout 4 is run with a ENB?

[SharraShimada]

1. try without enb, but i doubt that will be the problem

2. if you have skyrim, which uses an older version of the engine, try playing and observe.

3. use a real stresstest for your graphicsboard. I recommend furmark.

 

If furmark crashes your computer, there are 3 possibilities at hand:

Powersupply is too low.

Graphic is broken (either by driver, by windows or by hardware)

or the mainboard does not deliver the corret power over PCI-E slot.

 

Good luck

[bben46]

Add possible overheating to the list. Modern GPU & CPUs will slow way down to try to recover from overheating. But if you are playing a game like FO4 then slowing down won't help.

 

Another possibility is some background process stealing clock cycles and causing the game to get out of sync. A PM type program can decide to call home to check for status updates and cause this. Some update programs will decide to run at a certain time and if the update fails , keep trying. I had this happen with Oblivion on an XP machine. An old HP print driver updater would wake up after the computer had been running for a certain length of time and start trying to call. It was calling an expired update site so it always failed. Then it would wait exactly 10 minutes and try again. Each time it did this it crashed Oblivion. I could reboot the computer and the problem would go away for a while, but until I found and killed that old HP printer update it was difficult to play.

[Lansat]

I ran both the GPU and CPU stress tests via the EVGA benchmark for about 30m each, and neither of them gave any problems. The GPU hit upper 70's at the highest and the CPU in the 50's. I've played around some other games but literally the only thing that seems to be causing this is fallout 4. I don't understand why it's only fallout 4 that is giving me this issue either since i've been running it with the same setup and settings for weeks without any problems.

 

I might try moving the install to a faster hard drive, i just recently noticed that the same audio distortion can sometimes occur during loading lag only temporarily and goes away by itself. Completely guesswork at this point.

 

Well that didn't really fix it. Loads a lot faster now but i still get a strange microstutter where fps will just drop for a second with buzzing audio distortion. I'm going to guess this means that the major pc crashing stutters are still around.

Edited September 6, 2016 by Lansat

[Lansat]

Well this was solved in the most unexpected way. New game? no more crashing. TIL a bad fallout 4 save file can crash your entire system somehow.

[SMB92]

Throwing out a BSOD was it? 0x50 etc, probably problem with memory corruption. Rare to see the entire system go, I'd be running memtest on your RAM overnight.

[Lansat]

Throwing out a BSOD was it? 0x50 etc, probably problem with memory corruption. Rare to see the entire system go, I'd be running memtest on your RAM overnight.

That's definitely in the realm of possibility, it's just inexplicable why it only affects fallout 4, and why a new game save would all of a sudden not have that issue. My old desktop of 6-7 years ago had a ram problem w/ memtest errors that required a RMA, and with that the bsod/crashing was pretty universal.

 

It's also possible that the issue could reappear in the new save under the right circumstances, only time will tell.

Edited September 10, 2016 by Lansat

[cossayos]

My CPU fan was way to weak and so I got rather frequent system crashes when playing any game. So, yes, overheating should be top on your list.

[Lansat]

My CPU fan was way to weak and so I got rather frequent system crashes when playing any game. So, yes, overheating should be top on your list.

I considered that but after running CPU burner and furmark, neither of those caused any particularly high temps. Also with that old save i was getting the pre-crash lag/audio distortion even in very low load areas like a small interior cell.

 

Just wondering if a memory problem could be really THAT specific to one thing.

 

Strange buzzing started at random on the new save as well after about 16 hours in with nothing in particular going on except vivid weathers snow, yet cpu/gpu were not particularly stressed with temps at 40/70 C respectively.

Edited September 11, 2016 by Lansat

[SharraShimada]

Hmmm... you SAY the CPU had 70°C... By what program?

Is it the combined CPU-temp? Or the core-temp of the single cores?

 

When i ask my system for the combined, it says... oh no worries, its around 40°C on tops. Thats fine.

If i ask for specific data, it shows, 1 or 2 cores already reached 60°C or 70°C.

 

So, never trust a combined score for temperature.