(Not sure if I am asking at the right site, as it might be software/hardware related and not exactly gaming. I guess I'll post this question on Arqade too.)
I have been having this problem since 2 days now.
While playing the game, everything works fine, on ultra settings, with no overheating (max temp. 70). It has been working fine since the game as been released, and I have had no issues till recently. Nothing has changed on my PC since then.
Now, while playing the game, my PC just restarts. There are no errors, no lags, no game hang, etc. It just restarts as if some one pressed the hard restart button. Once the PC restarts, I start the game, and as soon as my previous save loads, the PC restarts again. (It restarts as soon as I enter play mode, has no problems while its showing the cut-scene while loading the game).
I have tried starting and loading the game for 7 times now, my PC restarts as soon as it loads, every single time.
This happens only with Witcher 3 at the moment. It has rendered the game unplayable, as it restarts my PC immediately on starting to play. I do not think it is a hardware issue, as the game has been working flawlessly before the last 2 days. This PC restart problem is completely new, and pretty continuous in occurrence. I was thinking these sudden restarts might be because of the PSU, but I just got this PSU a month ago, and have been running Witcher 3 on it without any issues, till this happened.
My System Info:
CPU: i5 4690k
Motherboard: MSI Z97 Gaming 5 (BIOS version 1.9)
GPU: MSI GTX 970 (NVIDIA Drivers: 353.06)
RAM: Kingston Hyper X 8GB RAM
PSU: Cooler Master V550w Gold Class
OS: Win 8.1 64 bit
This is what I have tried so far to look into the issue, with no luck in solving the issue unfortunately.
- Detached and re-attached all cables from my PSU to the PC components, to ensure they are properly attached.
- Tried other games to see if the problem persists (other games work fine)
- Did a fresh clean installation of nvidia drivers, latest version (353.06)
- Did a fresh clean installation of older nvidia drivers (Witcher 3 Game Ready Drivers)
- Uninstalled and reinstalled the game
- Used registry cleaner to check registry for any errors etc, cleaned if there were errors
- Used System Restore to restore to a time when it was normally working (which is 2 days ago)
- Turned of cutscene ubersampling in game visuals.ini file
- Uninstalled MSI Afterburner and Riva Tuner (I was just using these to monitor and for OSD, no overclocking etc.)
- Tried running the game on varying settings – Low, Med, High etc.
- Tried running the 1.04 patch version, in case the issue was with patch 1.05
- Tried running New Game instead of loading off a save, still had the same issue.
Any help would be much appreciated.
[EDIT]
On checking event logs on windows, I found out that at the exact moment my PC restarts, Critical Kernel Power (event ID 41) error.
Not sure if this gives more clues about the error.
Also, when I am playing, my GPU TDP is around 98-99%. I just started measuring TDP. Is that normal?
Best Answer
Applications shouldn't make the PC restart randomly at any circumstance, clearly your problem is not related to the game. It's hardware or driver issue.
It's always challenging to determine a defect when it happens at random, unfortunately the only reliable way to find out is changing parts until you find what was causing the issue.
Generally, it's memory. But it's not necessarily defect, sometimes something as simple as inverting the slots can solve the problem.
In this particular case, analyzing your settings, I can also suggest your PSU is dangerously lacking for the graphics card you have, that can be an issue in potential.
If you don't have access to a more robust PSU, you can try and see if shutting down unecessary hardware solves the issue. Unplug the optical drive, secondary disks and any external device you don't require to play the game and see if it solves (or at least mitigates) the problem. If positive, you need a more powerful PSU to have all your stuff running together.