Alt + Tab causing a system restart

While playing WoW (Retail / Shadowlands), every time I Alt + Tab away from the game (e.g., into my web browser or another program), there’s a chance the system will instantly crash and automatically restart.

I’ve gone through my hardware and tested with other games. Couldn’t find a cause and it doesn’t happen elsewhere (be it a game or another kind of software - the issue is exclusively present when alt tabbing away from WoW).

I reckon this might be a GPU / driver-related issue; I hadn’t played for a few weeks and I guess the GPU driver had been updated a couple times in the meantime, so I have lost track of the last driver that worked perfectly. My GPU is a GTX 970, currently running the latest driver.

This would be a system issue, which is outside the scope of support here in the forum. It does sound like your driver or hardware is failing when you perform the alt+tab.

I do understand this is a issue related to the specific interaction between WoW + my GPU + the video drivers and that there’s not much WoW’s team can do to help me, however, I was hoping to find someone wiht with a similar issue.

this may work – uninstall the GPU driver using DDU restart computer and go to the Nvidia’s website download / install the latest drivers reboot then test if it restarts when alt + tabbing…

OK, I’ve figured out a fix, and it’s definitely not what you’d expect.

After trying DDU and, since it yielded no results, entirely formatting my machine and re-installing Windows, the issue persisted. So, I’ve used Open Hardware Monitor to keep track of my PC’s parameters - temperatures, voltages, power, etc.

I was able to recreate the issue (playing WoW, alt + tabbing into Firefox and having the system crash) and noticed a very curious thing: the penultimate recorded TDP for my GPU was that of 180 W (all the surrounding values - including one last value - were a lot lower than that).

So I’ve installed MSI Afterburner (a software I’m familiar with since I used to OC this very rig before it started going unstable) and topped out the power limit to 112% (it’s a pretty safe power limit, in case you are not familiar with OC’ing) and ran the same scenario: playing WoW with multiple alt tabs.

After about 20 minutes, logging the parameters every 1 second, I was able to get one single recording of 200 W (among 1600 recordings). Here’s the plotted values (X-axis is the # of the recording; Y-axis is the TDP in W).

imgur-com/a/FeG1kxl

So, in short, there’s some shenanigans happening with my GPU that causes alt + tabbing from a game to be extremely demanding sometimes, and the system was shutting down because it was drawing more power than the default options allow it to. Raising the safe limit allows me to bypass this issue.

I understand the risks (mainly temperature-related - it’s not gone over 70 celsius, though), so, in case someone is experiencing a similar issue, please do be careful about the tweaks you make.

remove the card and reseat it … if you have an desktop what is your power supply? it might be on the way out. if it’s under 485 it may not getting enough power to the GPU …

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