I first noticed this trying to play Baldur’s Gate 3. The screen would go black, I would hear a small “zap” noise coming from the PC tower, and then the PC would reboot.
The card and machine are bought used off of eBay, and I certainly recognize they may be of questionable quality. However, I would like to know with as much certainty and precision what the issue is.
You see I’m on a little journey of exploration trying to learn more about my system and debugging ever deeper more complex issues.
I’ve managed to create a minimal reproduction by running the Unigine Superposition benchmark. (UNIGINE Benchmarks)
I’m going to rerun it to see if I can get the precise scene at which the PC crashes.
I’ll try some of the previous benchmarks to see if they also cause the PC to crash. I also have an Radeon card coming in a few days so I can see if that fixes the issue.
Run 1: crashed at scene 1, PC sang a weird beep song, didn’t restart itself, had to poweroff. Tried powering on, sang the weird beep song again, did not boot. Waited a few minutes, tried again, worked.
Spontaneous reboots/shutdowns are only initiated by the mainboard as a safety measure due to overheating or lack of power. Please monitor cpu temperatures, if those are normal, your psu is likely broken.