Lately my PC has started crashing while it plays videos. It freezes completely, screen frozen and not responding to any input (keyboard, mouse), I mean I cannot change TTY (alt + ctrl + F(1-2-…)), and it cannot even respond to alt + PrntScr + REISUB. I have to force power off by holding down the power button.
After I reboot I have tried checking all logs available and I cannot find anything logged right before the incident. Last entries are always different and not indicating anything.
I suspect it has to do with the graphics card but I’m looking for ways that I can dig deeper on that and confirm it or not.
What else should I check? How can I find more info?
OS: Lubuntu 22.04.3 LTS (latest updates) I’m using the nvidia proprietary drivers (nvidia-driver-390)
UPDATE:
First of all thank you all for your input and fresh ideas. Now I’ve already tried some of them and I will continue with the other ones until I get some results.
till now I have tried
- memtest and it didn’t show any errors.
- boot from a live distro and see if problem also occurs. Well it didn’t occur but on the live distro you cannot change the graphics driver. So it was using the open source nouveau driver, also it didn’t happen during the 1 hour I let it play. The thing is that it never was punctual even before. It could happen during the first hour or the third or sometime later.
Next steps are to
- open the case and clean it up to remove the possibility of high temp because of that,
- change my drivers to be the nouveau and try again,
- try with only the onboard GPU on,
- remove extra disks to reduce the load of the PSU
thank you all again.
Would it be too much to remove the GPU and run videos? How often does it happen? If it’s easy to reproduce, and it’s not too much work, you can try removing the GPU and using onboard gfx to see if the problem persists.
Another suggestion, maybe try different drivers.
Alternatively, you could boot do a new install to a usb, install the same or different drivers or both, to see if the problem persists.
This does seem like a stability issue, either on the hardware or firmware side. It could even be as simple as reseating the GPU.
btw, do you happen to remember whenabout the first crash happened? Did it start out sporadic and grow more frequent?
it started happening before one month. It could have such pattern, yes. In the beginning it started happening some of the times I was watching any video. In the end it ended up happening almost every time. Today I’m still trying to make it happen though but not yet.
Sorry to hear that. These types of issues are very frustrating.Something tells me it’s your GPU, but CPU and RAM issues can look totally weird like this as well.