Screen goes a coloured blue or pink and hard crashes

Technical Support
1

Just started playing today and it just went blue (or pink, can’t remember which) and nothing else. This was on both monitors too. The only solution: Hard reset.

This is not cool.

I started the game up again immediately after and it happened again within about 30 seconds of entering a game.

I’m not sure if this is related to the other crashing problems or not, so I made it’s own thread just in case.

I haven’t done anything different since yesterday, where Overwatch worked fine.

EDIT: I’ve NEVER gotten a reply from Blizzard Tech Support in these forums. Why was I expecting something this time around?!

2

This is generally a sign of your drivers malfunctioning or your system overheating. Make sure that your drivers are from Jan or Feb 2019, and check temps with HWMonitor (temps should be below 70C for both CPU and GPU).

3

Thanks for the reply.

Done both. When it happened I immediately updated the Nvidia drivers. No change.

I assumed it was an overheating issue. I looked at a temp program. It never went over 55 degrees © before crashing. This is both CPU and GPU. GPU fans never went on.

I then started to wonder if the temp signal was faulty and tried to verify that the fans were going on. I couldn’t get them going with any game before it crashed. In the end I managed to get them going with a video card stress test. It was stable at 65 degrees or less. But I noted that gcards respond differently to stress test programs, so I don’t know what to conclude there.

So I got no idea what’s going on. The problem still persists.

I’m about to open it up (again) and uninstall the drivers and remove the card and clean it and then reinstall the drivers to see if that helps.

Also, I just found out it has an ASIC value of 69%, which is apparently on the low side. I’ve only just found out about the ASIC value but I don’t know what it really means except that it suggests the quality of the cards set up.

If anyone has any ideas I would LOVE to hear it, because I’m dead in the water as I cannot play any game at all. If cleaning it doesn’t fix the problem, then I’m out of ideas.

Also, I have a water cooled CPU (gcard is fan cooled), so there isn’t a lot of dust in the system. So I’m rather pessimistic that it’s a cooling issue.

Also of note is that the sound craps out too when it crashes. So I’m not sure if it might be some other issue or what not.

Also, I can play a visual novel with only static pictures without issue. I can stream without issue and if I play a visual novel WITH some animation, it will last longer than other games but it also crashes eventually (further supporting the temp issue, but I cannot find any evidence of it actually being a temp issue.)

Any other ideas would be great!

4

Cujo,

All of your behavior indicates a temp issue, as you expect. If this is happening in multiple games after long periods of time playing, including low-power ones like visual novels with animations, and you have sound issues, that usually means it’s a CPU overheat. Liquid cooling can sometimes be a pain to install and if it’s not done just right this kind of thing is pretty common. (Most often it’s just air in the cooling lines if it’s a fill system or bad thermal paste for a closed system).

The trouble with these hard crashes are that the system crash makes it hard to SEE the problem, but I can help you out there. I recommend a stress test to try to duplicate it without the game running. We’re going to try checking for overheating on the CPU or GPU by running a stress test. For this, I like to run three programs - HWMonitor for hardware sensing, Heaven Benchmarking Tool to test the GPU, and Prime95 to stress test the CPU.

You’re going to need to download these three programs, and run all of them simultaneously. For Heaven, try running in windowed mode at the high graphics setting. For Prime95 you want to run the “Blend” test. All of these need to run for 2-3 hours, so I recommend doing it at a time when you can casually monitor your HWMonitor results and keep an eye out for extended periods of overheating - like during a day you’re cooking something or watching a movie or something.

If you find overheating, you can take the computer to a PC tech to have that resolved. If the computer crashes or restarts spontaneously before the overheating test is over, you will need to do the same because there’s probably a power problem or an even more dangerous overheating issue. If you can run the test for more than 2-3 hours without an overheating CPU/GPU, then get some screenshots of the test and send them in to us. To do this:

  1. Maximize the HWMonitor window and expand all the nodes on the left
  2. Scroll all the way up
  3. Take a screenshot with the Print Screen (prtscn) key
  4. Open up the program Paint and press ctrl+v to paste in the test
  5. Crop the screen if you want to only show the test, then save it as Test1.JPG
  6. Scroll all the way down, then repeat steps 3-5.
  7. Upload them somewhere like imgur and link us to the results. We’ll use those to look for more options.

Let us know how it looks!

1 Like
5

OK Thanks for that reply.

Long story short, I went through a heap of stuff and ultimately found out it was my gcard. It was stuffing up for some reason. It wasn’t the power supply (which is a 1 year old $300 Corsair power supply) thank goodness. But the 980 Ti seemed to have crapped out for some reason. It was only just outside warranty too.

So I ended up getting another gcard: RTX 2080 Ti (Founders Edition).

Now I’m broke :frowning: lol

Thanks for the help though. It helped a lot in diagnosing the problem.

PS Oh and it wasn’t a temp issue or a power supply issue. No idea what it was. Actually, in hindsight, there was a win 10 update I was supposed to get in October that I didn’t get. I only realised I needed it because the update had the ray tracing update in it and so I needed to make sure I had it. I wonder if not having that update was the cause of the 980 Ti faltering. One day I’ll test it to see, now that I’ve updated win 10.

6

Well, I am glad you figured it out. I try not to jump to “your card is dying” because that can really upset some players. :smile:

7

Well it was a 3 year old GTX 980 Ti so yeah, I probably wouldn’t have taken the advice very well if you did lol. All good in the end. I’m broke, but happy.

1 Like