3 Years of crashing to black screens.

[Sclurp]

Hi all,
I will post my specs below.

I purchased my PCSpecialist build 3 years ago and had problems with it from day one. I have been in touch with their tech helpline on the phone countless times (they're a great bunch who do try their best to help). But my PC has gone back to them 4 times now, I've received it back with new issues that then had to be fixed by sending it back again. All of this to result in no actual fix for this issue.
The reason this has been going on for 3 years is I get a reprieve from this for some time and then it comes back. It's incredibly disruptive as it interferes with content creation/ recording/ writing. It always comes back. I can be doing anything; just on the desktop; playing a game; streaming; browsing the web, and my PC will suddenly crash to black screens on both monitors with sound still coming through my headphones for about 10 seconds before everything is gone entirely. The PC remains powered and no keyboard prompts to reset the GPU brings back the any visuals.

I update drivers. I have enlisted the help of people who work in IT support, people who work as game developers who build PCs as a hobby, and no one can figure out what is going on based on looking at the hardware and the event/error log. And as I said, I've now sent it back to PCSpecialist four times and had their tech support take a look at my PC remotely too. We've even updated the BIOS, we've completely wiped the PC and reinstalled Windows twice. Every component bar the CPU and power supply (which were checked at least) has been replaced. The PC has its own socket in the mains, and isn't powered by an adapter/extender.

I was told that the manager in the UK branch was going to personally oversee the inspection/ repairs the last time it went to PCspecialist and that he would speak to me before it got sent back to me. But this never happened. It was just sent back and I found a whole bunch of cables unplugged and just left hanging inside.

If I could afford to, I would pull apart the whole thing and sell the parts, and get a whole new PC. But that's not an option sadly. I'm desperately seeking help to get this resolved.

Specs:

Thank you for reading.

 

[Sclurp]

Addendum:
One consistent behaviour with this crash, when it does come back after not happening for a long while is:
If it is happening, I will get consistent crashes when I exit a game. There will be about 30-60 seconds in between a game closing and the crash. It's the only consistent behaviour about it when it *is* happening regularly.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Could you go through the following and update?

When you're seeking help with a BSOD

Don't Panic! Many people panic when they get a BOSD, partly this is because they happen unexpectedly and because they usually happen without warning, but also because many believe they mean you have a hardware problem. The good news is that in the majority of cases a BSOD is a software problem...

www.pcspecialist.co.uk

From immediate looking, the cooler is questionable for the CPU, I wouldn't be happy with that pairing personally and it's something I'd immediately swap out.

If it were me, I'd probably temporarily remove the PCS SSD from the system just for testing as we've seen some really strange behaviour from flaky drives.

But don't touch anything for now, let @ubuysa take a look at your output reports

 

[Sclurp]

Could you go through the following and update?

When you're seeking help with a BSOD

Don't Panic! Many people panic when they get a BOSD, partly this is because they happen unexpectedly and because they usually happen without warning, but also because many believe they mean you have a hardware problem. The good news is that in the majority of cases a BSOD is a software problem...

www.pcspecialist.co.uk

From immediate looking, the cooler is questionable for the CPU, I wouldn't be happy with that pairing personally and it's something I'd immediately swap out.

If it were me, I'd probably temporarily remove the PCS SSD from the system just for testing as we've seen some really strange behaviour from flaky drives.

But don't touch anything for now, let @ubuysa take a look at your output reports

Hi there, Spyder.

Thank you for your reply. The cooler was replaced (though the type of cooler is the same I believe). As they had sent it back from RMA once and the moment I turned it on, the PC went up to 100 degrees whilst being idle. So the team had made a mistake there, or something happened in transit. I hadn't considered the cooler perhaps was not doing its job well enough. I do have a desktop app that can monitor temps and I never saw it go too high when I had it open. But I will definitely treat it was an avenue to investigate.

Thank you for the suggestion with the SSDs.
I will wait to see if ubuysa wants to take a crack at this.

Thank you.

 

[SpyderTracks]

I do have a desktop app that can monitor temps and I never saw it go too high when I had it open. But I will definitely treat it was an avenue to investigate.

The only way to tell is under a stress test as under normal operation, CPU load and frequency is very transient, it’s those micro moments or short periods where you wouldn’t necessarily see it throttling in real time that a stress test will highlight.

Prime95 or Cinebench are good cpu stresses, Furmark is good for just GPU

 

[SpyderTracks]

I also wonder if this may be transient spike related to the GPU and PSU, these kinds of symptoms can often be related, they leave most people perplexed and turns out the GPU is spiking way beyond what the PSU can supply so it just cuts power to it. 850W is the very minimum for that GPU not accounting for transient spikes.