So, my ancient-ish PC is giving me trouble now. I updated drivers last week, everything was working fine.
Then, on this Sunday, I was playing Grim Dawn and noticed that there was something weird when enemies/creatures disappeared - like vertexes would stretch way more than they should. A few minutes later, the screen blinked and went black (I could still see the mouse cursor fine). I tried ALT-F4 to close the game and it worked. Checked the event log, and it said the nvidia driver crashed but recovered.
I tried running Grim Dawn again. Hard freeze. Rebooted. Tried a “light” game - Heat Signature. Played fine for a bit, then a black screen again. Checked the event log - it was filled with “event 13” errors coming from the nvidia driver.
Since then, I tried changing drivers (again) multiple times, tried cleaning the GPU, etc. No 3D games will work correctly. Even when they boot, it doesn’t take long for them to go into a black screen, with the same errors in the event log.
This is an old video card, a GTX 760, and I noticed it got more than a little bent due to to gravity. So I suppose it’s possible some track in the circuit board broke or something… but I wanted to check if there’s any other possible explanation. Apart from 3D stuff, it seems to work fine. PC boots correctly, I can browse and all, straining the CPU (by compiling Rust code) works fine. Flash games like Epic Battle Fantasy also work fine. But if I try to run any 3D game, it will crash the driver, either immediately or after a little while.
I’m actually looking to see if I buy a whole new PC, and I planned to do so anyway, but I want to try to salvage this one, if only to use it for other stuff. Any ideas? Could it be the PSU or something else? Any easy ways for me to diagnose it? I appreciate any insight.
Yes it can be a dying psu as well. I’m sorry to tell you that because that is a pita to diagnose. Maybe there’s shops that can put in a new psu to test.
Unless you know someone in the computer shop business it might cost you less to just try and replace the PSU and GPU yourself. They’re old so low end new might just give you the same performance because you wouldn’t have to spring for the most expensive PSU or GPU to do that. The risk would be it’s neither component and something to do with maybe board itself or the slot it’s in.
I’m near enough to often have spare parts lying around so I would swap any suspect parts myself before I ever took them to a shop.
I had a similar problem, although it was not as extreme, but I remember the “event 13” errors. I mostly could play games, but during boot up, things would go wonky. If I made it through boot up, then things would work fine.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I had ignored the problem for a while, until one day, my computer would not power up. I got a new PSU and all the problems went away. No more event 13 errors. PSUs are cheap and easy to install. I am sure christmas sales should be starting off soon, so they should be even cheaper. I would try getting a new PSU, especially if yours is over 5 years old.
Actually, service is free for me at this particular shop - they only charge for replacement parts, because I bought the PC there. And I don’t have spare parts around (or money to risk at something that might or might not be a fix), so it’s probably easier for me to take the PC there anyway.
Yeah, this PC is almost 5 years old, and I’m under the impression that the PSU was making some strange clicks every once in a while. It could be that. We’ll see.
Anyway, I’m buying a new PC today anyway - it was about time I had an upgrade anyway. But I’m interested in fixing the current one so I can use for other stuff.
As for the old one, I don’t take my stuff to shops anymore because they don’t do much more than I do and years ago I had one tell me they charged 50 bucks just to open the case and verify what kind of RAM I needed to see if they could sell it to me… even if I bought it from them. For less than 50 dollars you can get a decent PSU, and when my sister’s got into that half working phase it did exhibit some weirdo problems. For under 200 you could get a 1060 too and unless you’ve got some great shop they might charge 200 just to troubleshoot.
Well, keep in mind that I’m not in the US. A decent PSU here costs considerably more than what 50 bucks mean to you - enough that buying one isn’t something I would do just to experiment. Same is true of a 1060 or any other component. Living in a 3rd world country like this isn’t easy for PC lovers. ;)
And in my case, since the shop won’t charge for service (only parts), it should work better since they do have spare parts they can use to experiment and find out what’s wrong. Hopefully that will work.
i’m sorry. I forgot where you were from, yeah you don’t get the 30 dollar type deals I grab once in awhile, just in case. I almost always have spare parts sitting around, so unless it’s the mobo or the cpu, I can usually track it down myself, well on a desktop. I am kind of stuck with anything smaller like laptops and tablets/phones.
This makes a world of difference too. If they’re not going to charge a lot of labor and diagnostic fees just to figure out if they can fix it then all the better!
Trust me - in situations like this, I wish I lived in the US. As far as technology goes, it’s easier, cheaper, and with a lot more options than anything I can even dream of around here. But oh well, I got the short stick. Kind of. ;)
5 Years is a good run too! I remember, wayback years, when 6 months out even if you didn’t have a hardware issue you’d be lacking for some new game. That fresh computer smell is a lot less common now.
Do you have Amazon where you live? If you do, just order a cheap video card, try it out and see if it resolves the issue. If it does you can decide if you want to keep the new VC. If not, send it back for free. Now you know it may be the PSU. But it still could be memory as well. But you can test memory easily with Memtest. You can also just stress test the cpu/mobo/RAM with prime95.
If you have an Intel processor, there’s a good chance it has a (shitty) GPU built in, allowing you to just remove the Nvidia card and use the computer and see if this Error 13 comes up again. You will need to connect your monitor to the motherboard’s VGA/HDMI/DVI port, and you may need to set something in the BIOS to enable the Intel GPU.
…or bring it to the shop, they can do this easily, too.
We have Amazon here, but it doesn’t sell PC components. Also, “sending back for free” is not a thing that exists in Brazil for a multitude of reasons, many of which have to do with people abusing that kind of thing way too much. :(
I thought about that, but it is back to booting fine for now - should be enough for me to take the files I need and put them in the new PC. I might do that if the situation changes before I take it to the shop. Thanks!
Just remember, if you can’t get the old computer to boot you don’t actually need that to get information from the drive. You can use a harddrive dock or case to read information from it. this would of course require you to remove the drive(s), but you can always put them back if you want to make the older machine run again.
