When I shoot or crash in new games my pc crashes

Hey guys, this is my first time doing this so please be patient,

I bought GTA complete pack from steam from steam the other day and patiently waited for the 40gb of files to download and they all ran fine but when I play GTA IV it runs fine until I shoot someone or crash in a car.

When I shoot or crash then the screen goes black, the sound loops and the only way I can do anything is if I use task manager to shut down my pc (and even then it gets to "shutting down ..." and stays there until I hold down the power button). When I turn it back on everything is fine but I don't know why it's doing it.

The same thing also happens when I crash in Burnout Paradise or shoot in Battlefield 3 and I have tried to unistall and reinstall all games and nothing changes.

All drivers and games are up to date.

Any ideas guys?


PC Specs:

Processor: AMD Athlon II X4 635 (2.9 GHz)
RAM: 8GB
Graphics: Palit Nvidia Geforce GTS 450 (1GB, DDR5)
OS: Windows 7, 64 bit, Service pack 1

Have you tried verifying the files through steam? Such a big download maybe something got missed.

its a bit to big of thing to be a coincidence for all the games, and BF3 is a origin game not steam.

im going to predict its either a RAM fault or a GPU issue.

try running memtest Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool and see if you get any crashes or blue screens.

if it doesnt show any, its still worth taking out all bar one ram stick, testing, then swaping it for another ect

forgive my poor manners! Welcome to the forum

right so I'm now really confused, all 3 games just randomly started working. I did clear my temp files a few days ago but BF3 froze many times after I did that. But at the moment all 3 games are working fine

Ahhhh GTA just crashed I'm really confused now because it worked yesterday

So when you crash a car in the game...the pc crashes? Now that is what i call a realistic game! You have to love the new technology haha,just messing with you, have you tried some basics like defragging your hardrive( dont if its a ssd) , running virus scans, doing a disc clean up and so on? If not try it,maybe it will help.

Also run a benchmark test like 3d mark, if it crashes or shutsdown you know atleast its not a problem with your games. Then try running each major hardware seperatly on stress test. For xample, you can remove the cpu test on 3d mark to see if its the gpu thats faulty, or run prime95 to test your cpu, and use memtest for ram and so on. I know this is not an answer you want, but it usually helps me when i need to know whats causing problems.

Ps. Welcome to seven forums!

I also suggest checking your heat in your PC. Hardware will crash & burn if it is too hot in your case (RAM is notoriously known for this, as well as the CPU). Heat monitoring software is free to download from searching on Google. My computer beeps at me if my case temperature starts rising above 71. Thankfully I haven't experienced any heating crashes.

I don't think its a virus (if it is its incredibly well hidden) because i've scanned with kaspersky and mbam.

It could be overheating, I'll have to look into that. But I don't think there is anything wrong with the hardware because other game run fine.

Also I have seen on other forums that dodgy sound could be to blame, how would this make my pc crash and if it is that how do I fix it?

Well, the Audigy 2 was somewhat well known to cause some PC games to crash. I just use the onboard sound, and it works fine for me.

yeah I'm using onboard sound too but I'm just thinking that this is bound to be caused by something stupid because for a few days it worked and now it doesn't

Why not go buy a PCI slotted soundcard then? See if that fixes the problem. If it doesn't, then it's probably something else.

Edit: And if you don't want the soundcard you bought, you could always just return it anyway.

try unninstalling your antivirus and then see if you can make your computer crash in game ?

I suggest load a free alternative AV such as MSE for debugging purposes

Solved it, I knew it would be something stupid.

For some reason whenever my xbox controller (which is made for windows) is plugged in it causes the games to crash when I crash.

Now to go smash the controller with a hammer.

*gives Turtl a good 30oz hammer* Here you go, good sir! Smash away! I don't like controllers.

MisterTurtl3 said:

Solved it, I knew it would be something stupid.

For some reason whenever my xbox controller (which is made for windows) is plugged in it causes the games to crash when I crash.

Now to go smash the controller with a hammer.

Click to expand...

this sounds like a driver conflict ?

Is there more than one version of the xbox drivers installed on your machine ?

There could be I'll try to uninstall everything related to it