Description: For past week or so, I’ve been encountering frequent shut downs while using Unreal Engine 4. They happen without warning, and though it’s difficult to pinpoint cause, attempting to build lighting and PIE appear to be common triggers. Shut downs have occurred in a variety of other circumstances; for example, a shut down once occurred about 10 seconds after launching a project, and before I even did anything.
Following a shut down, I am unable to turn on my PC with power button; instead I must resort to pressing CMOS reset switch on rear I/O panel. This happens 100% of time.
Windows Event Viewer logs these shut down events with following details:
Level: Critical
Source: Kernal-Power
Event ID: 41
Task Category: (63)
Description: system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.
After some testing, I noticed my CPU was reaching very high temperatures under load. I discovered that thermal paste had dried out. I have since replaced it with brand new Arctic Silver 5, and temperatures are now much better. I have also since thoroughly cleaned inside of my PC and re-seated all of components, including power cables. Unfortunately, problem still persists.
At this point I suspect either a dying GPU or a voltage issue. I have ruled out a GPU driver issue by testing multiple driver versions, including latest; no change. What’s led me to then suspect a dying GPU is fact that Unreal Engine 4 triggers issue, but other software that makes heavy use of CPU and RAM–but not GPU–does not. I use music production software that is very CPU/RAM-intensive but barely touches GPU, and even after several consecutive hours of use on a daily basis, I have never seen it cause a shut down. I am not knowledgeable enough to pursue voltage theory, so I have not carried out any voltage testing because I don’t want to damage any of my components.
I have attached my DXDiag file for further analysis.
Repro Steps: I can’t provide accurate repro steps or a repro rate since I can’t pinpoint any one thing that’s causing shut downs. I could be doing literally anything in editor, it seems; as long as editor is open, it can happen.
Looking back, sometime, crashes happened with wrong version of graphics driver in my own experiences. Some GPU function recently added on your game project might be clue…
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Please attach your dxdiag and most recent log from your project before it shut down.
I had same in a low power box, due to huge power consumption it restarted whole box (this is actually a OS issue). solution was to set max frame-rate to 30 frames, this way editor consumer much less resources.
I think you’re on right path. Do you play any graphically intensive video games that you could use to stress-test GPU? 750w power supply should be plenty unless you have some really power-hungry peripherals, and CPUs are very rarely source of problems like this… but it’s not impossible.
Another thing to test would be whether or not editor crashes if left idle for an extended period. If your computer shuts down just by having editor open for fifteen minutes, that implies a different cause than a shutdown that occurs generally due to PIE.
Thanks for reply, Jonathan. I do play Guild Wars 2 and I own plenty of other games on Steam that I could stress test with.
I hadn’t thought of letting editor idle to see if it eventually shuts down or not. I’ll run some tests there, too. I will mention, however, that yesterday I suddenly had no shut downs all day–very unusual for how active this problem has been for past week or so–then today it happened again while I was simply roaming around editor in a simple example map. editor had been open for maybe 15-20 minutes and I spent most of time working on blueprints.
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