Board 8 > Why would games on my new SSD keep crashing?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Some of you may remember a topic I made a couple weeks ago which had questions about installing a new SSD into my PC. The result of that topic was that I got the SSD, installed it and it worked!...or at least it looked like it did. Everything APPEARED to be fine, even better than fine compared to my old HDD. But then I started trying to play games on it....

First was The Outer Worlds. No mater where I was, after about 15 minutes the game would crash. It wasn't always 15 minutes, sometimes it was even so quick I didn't even have time to press start on the main menu. Now by crash I mean the game would freeze and my PC would reboot. I would have to log back in and everything. At first I chalked this up to, hey, it's a new game maybe there's some weird bug or something or maybe my PC just can't handle the game.

Then I tried Destiny 2. This is a game my PC SHOULD be able to run, but I never tried it before. Again, same thing. So OK, maybe some other part of my PC is bad or outdated and that's causing it...

Then I tried Final Fantasy 14. This is a game I KNOW my PC can run, and I've played tons of hours of it on my HDD with the same parts my PC has now. While my first play session went OK, played about an hour with no problems, now it's gone bad. Between 1-15 minutes into the game, it all crashes.

Reverting to the old HDD is not feasible. I feel like I must be doing something wrong, but I can't figure out what. Again, outside of games the PC runs fine I can leave it on all day doing anything else and nothing goes wrong. Now that this problem is affecting games I know can run on it, I'm not sure what to do..
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Is it possible its defective? I dont know anything else about the subject

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they hate you
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So I discovered something interesting. I kept FF14 on in the main character selection menu for about an hour. Nothing happened, no crashes, everything was fine. Then I log in. At the exact moment the game was finished loading, it crashed again. But what does it mean???
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GANON1025 posted...

So I discovered something interesting. I kept FF14 on in the main character selection menu for about an hour. Nothing happened, no crashes, everything was fine. Then I log in. At the exact moment the game was finished loading, it crashed again. But what does it mean???

Make sure your bios/all drivers are updated. This happened to me when I built my new computer a couple of weeks ago, just had to update a lot of things.
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That could possibly be it. After installing this new SSD and getting Windows running, the only drivers I personally sought out and got were for my graphics card. But where should I go to find this stuff? I DID try searching for drivers for my motherboard, but nothing really came up.
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Bump
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Have you run all of the Windows Updates you could? I was under the impression Graphics drivers were the only ones you had to actively seek out, and Microsoft was good about the rest through that process.

I read the same thing, and Windows is up to date as far as I know.
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Is this SSD replacing an old drive, or is it just being added onto the system? Have you upgraded anything else (hardware/peripherals, etc.)?

I had a similar issue where not all games, but certain games like Metal Gear Rising and Saint's Row 4 refused to work just after building a new PC due to a USB adapter (Mayflash bluetooth for my Wii U Pro Controllers) which was doing literally nothing as I hadn't even installed drivers for yet, and removing the USB device made everything work.

Alternately, I had similar issues when I bought a new Corsair Keyboard to upgrade my old Corsair Keyboard, and the newer more uh, "modern" stylized version of their gaming software that I had to download to make the RGB lighting work caused issues that the old version that my old keyboard used hadn't. The new software made it so that games like Dota 2 would often crash/hang on launch and not give any sort of useful error message when crashing, which I was advised generally is a graphics driver-related issue, but reinstalling those did nothing to help. Other games like Rocket League would crash too, but less reliably. I had found that I could reliably boot the games without issue and play if I launched them shortly after booting my PC, but the longer my system was up, the less chance that had of working, and the higher the chance the game client would crash, particularly if I tried to load into an actual match from the main menu. Never launching the new Corsair app (and turning it off in startup apps) fixed everything in that instance.

I'd generally try unplugging any unnecessary extra USB devices, and checking your startup applications in task manager and disabling any non-essential sounding ones you can and seeing if the issue persists.
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SSD is replacing the old drive as the main drive, but the older drive is hooked up. This new SSD is C, and the old drive is E now I think. Besides the SSD I havent upgraded anything else. I think possibly when I was attaching the new drive I may have knocked around the graphics card or ram maybe, I may need to try reseating them.
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Did you just clone over everything or actually install the games for real? I wouldn't be surprised if there was some registry fuckery crashing the games of they weren't installed properly on the SSD.
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No cloning, everything in this SSD is a new install. The other hard drive still has everything on it that it had before, I didnt delete anything from there.
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So there's a fresh Windows install on C, but the old installation and directories are still on E. I don't know for certain what sort of problems that would cause, but there can definitely be some jank in my experience. I'm presuming you redownloaded the games and put them on the SSD which is now C, but there are probably still old configuration files from your previous install on E. I don't know if you deleted/uninstalled the games from E, but in particular with the FFXIV issue, I wonder if for some reason it hits a point where it's maybe referencing files from the other side, even if you uninstalled it?

Is there anything in particular preventing you from reformatting the E drive?
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Yeah, you got the most of it. Honestly there's technically nothing stopping me from reformatting the old drive. Before I did all this I backed up all the important files just in case I couldn't use this other drive again.
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I tried reseating the RAM and graphics card, didn't seem to make a difference. The only correlation I can find between these crashes is that they *usually* happen when the game is loading or just about finished loading. Not all the time, but most of the time it happens then.

I'm all for trying to reformat the older drive if I need to, how should I go about doing that? I don't want to make things worse by doing it the wrong way, is all.
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But you know what game DOES work without any issue? Hearthstone. No problems at all, no crashes or anything. I don't what that means, though.
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GANON1025 posted...

But you know what game DOES work without any issue? Hearthstone. No problems at all, no crashes or anything. I don't what that means, though.

China greatest nation on planet.

All hail Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, President of the People's Republic of China and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

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Maybe try running games with the old drive unplugged?
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I was just about to ask that, is there anything wrong with me just unplugging the original drive and trying the games then? Guess not, I'll give it a go.
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Try running another less graphically demanding game and see if it crashes.

Id bet you need to uninstall all your graphic drivers (minus the basic ones Windows will auto-install).

If youre using nvidia, even delete the registry for it and everything (after youve uninstalled it and are running the default drivers).

Then restart your computer and reinstall your nvidia drivers.
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Id try completely uninstalling and reinstalling the graphic drivers, is uninstalling them easy to do?
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Well things have gotten the opposite of better. After turning off the PC and unplugging the original hard drive, now the PC boots up but no signal is going to the monitors. This is actually a problem I've faced before, so I don't think this is directly related to my unplugging the drive. The only thing that seems to fix this is to turn on and off the PC until finally the monitors get a signal again. I know the monitors work, and I know the cables are fine. Something else is the problem but I don't know what it is.
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This is starting to sound like a graphics card issue
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Is the monitor showing a signal during the POST, the screen before the operating system boots?
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That would be a good bet, between this display thing and the game crashing. I guess this card is a few years old. It's tough for me to upgrade because I know you have to worry about the power supply and I don't want to spend TOO much so I want a good card but it doesn't need to be the BEST card.
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Nothing is showing up on the monitors when I started the PC. If I unplug the monitors cable and plug them back in, I get a brief "NO SIGNAL FOUND" message on monitors before they go off again.
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Try plugging them directly into the ports on your motherboard, bypass your GPU and see if it boots.

Sounds like your card died, and your crashing was its last gasps for life.
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I'm not saying that's not possible, but this whole "PC is on but monitors get no signal" thing has occurred in the past, and eventually everything turns back to normal.
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Of course, maybe these are two different things. The no signal issues in the past are different than the ones I'm having right now, and I conflate the two in my mind because of how similar they appear.
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I should mention this right now, but I'm very grateful to everyone who is trying to help me out!!

I checked the motherboard, and it seems like there's no way for me to directly plug in the monitors to it (that is to say, if you need some kind of special cable to do that I don't know what that is).

But here's something I did notice while checking that out. I turned on the PC and watched the graphics card. The fans turned on for a couple seconds, then shut off. Don't know if that means anything, maybe the fans only turn on when they need to.

Maybe I should have done this earlier, but this is my PC's parts:

SSD: Samsung V-NAND SSD 860 EVO SATA 6B/s 1TB drive
Power Supply: SeaSonic S12II 520 Bronze 520W ATX12V V2.3 / EPS 12V V2.91 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply
Motherboard: MSI P67A-G45 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge Quad-Core 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W BX80623I52500K Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 3000
RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G (GV-N1060WF2OC-6GD)
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Bump!
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Wish I could help more. I've always wanted to build a proper awesome PC but I'm afraid it's gonna end up with me spending a bunch of money and something like this happening.
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GANON1025 posted...

I checked the motherboard, and it seems like there's no way for me to directly plug in the monitors to it (that is to say, if you need some kind of special cable to do that I don't know what that is).

Ah, Im assuming by this part youre running only HDMI to your monitors? You dont have a VGA or DVI cable somewhere?

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does your monitor and 1060 have a display port slot? most should, maybe try that first before anything else
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I feel like I checked before for some other thing and there wasnt, but Ill look again when I can.
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No, no display port slot.
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Is there a good upgrade graphics card that isn't too pricey. If I do have to theoretically get a new one, it may as well be a bit better.
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Oh yeah, to update I did order a new graphics card. Hopefully I'll hook this one up and everything will work, if not then I'll at least know it's something else doing all this.
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What did you end up going with?

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1660 Super
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Sooo I got the new graphics card today. I installed it, and now I'm seeing SOMETHING. It's a black screen with B2 on the bottom. There's also some red distorted stuff on the top. I'm sure this isn't normal right?
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Ok so a cursory google search says this may be the result of your power supply putting too much juice and affecting your GPU.

I'd take your shiny new GPU out asap until we can investigate further.

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What model is your power supply, how old is it, and do you happen to have a decent spare one lying around?

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I took out the new graphics card. The PSU I have is SeaSonic S12II 520 Bronze 520W ATX12V V2.3 / EPS 12V V2.91 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply . I believe it is from around 2011.
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Ok so that's an 8 year old Tier IV PSU, which means you're due for a replacement.

One of my least favorite things when troubleshooting is to tell people to buy new things, because in IT there's always that small chance of another issue being the root cause of an issue.

But in your case I can unequivocally say that replacing that would be a good thing.


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I have a new SSD too and put a fresh Windows install on it. My games on my HDD still run fine. This is most likely some sort of driver issue, or possibly with Steam if you didn't fresh install that too.

Still need to nuke my old SSD though because my computer habitually boots to that despite me putting that drive last in the BIOS. No idea why that is. Makes me nervous to wipe it tbqh. But it could be an issue with a conflict from one drive vs. another? IDK. I'm just hoping that my experiences can help you...
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I understand, and I knew it could come down to the PSU. It is decently old, and the things I'm experiencing could be caused by that. But isn't replacing the power supply super complicated? That's what makes me hesitate more than the price honestly.
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It's actually surprisingly easy, just lay your tower down flat in a well-lit area and take a picture of all the cables before you start unplugging it and taking it out.

That way you have a reference to make sure you plug everything back in.

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So if I just unplugged everything then plugged in the new PSU, as long as everything is plugged in correctly things should just work from there?
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