Is my GPU bad?

Heavy caveats here, we don’t really support hardware level issues directly as Blizzard agents, but I also understand that this is a complicated issue. For a review of our official stance on restarts, as well as some of the better steps for them check this link. I wanted to chime in with a couple quick pro tips which may help you at least find the problem.

When your PC spontaneously restarts, that’s usually going to be something more critical than the GPU. It’s possible it’s the problem, but that’s not usually where I start. More frequently I worry about power issues or CPU issues like some of the other posters here mentioned. Thing is - with an issue like this, it’s somewhat difficult to find the problem because you can’t keep a log of what causes the problem with a utility like HWmonitor - because the PC is crashing so you lose all the useful data. :<

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.

Regardless of what you find with this test, typically you’ll need to take the PC to a local technician to resolve it. For instance, if the CPU is overheating, you’d want them to check the thermal paste on it and make sure there’s no problem with the heat hardware. If prime95 hits you with a RAM error, you’d need to check to make sure they’re socketed correctly, and that there aren’t any defects with it.

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, we can peep them real quick to see if we can find any problems we’d support. 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.

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