Chamber of Heart crashes my PC randomly

Support Technical Support
1

Hi,

For several weeks now I have had a strange problem where my PC will randomly black out and restart. It only happens while playing WoW, and from what I have noticed it only happens in the Chamber of Heart. The reboot usually happens when I have zoned in to the chamber and walked around for 5-10 seconds, and sometimes happens while I try to sit afk in the chamber for a longer period of time. That being said, I have sat afk for more than 30 minutes several times in there without the reboot happening. If the reboot does happen, it will usually repeat itself pretty fast if I log onto a character in the chamber, usually within a few seconds to a few minutes. When the reboot happens, it will sometimes (not always) attempt a repair on my C drive as it is booting up. Even when I moved WoW to my 2nd SSD, it still attempted a repair on the C drive during consequent reboots.

I have attempted almost any fix I can find on the internet that is even remotely connected to issues like these. No temperatures are abnormally high from what I can see using HWMonitor, and Iā€™ve done several attempts at getting rid of the issue such as thorougly cleaning out the PC, making sure there are no loose cables, making sure drivers are updated and cleanly installed, and I even did a clean reinstall of Windows 10. The issue persists.

The Windows event log gives me a critical failure with event ID 41 and task category 63, which seems to point to the PSU not being able to deliver enough power. It is over 5 years old by now (and had a warranty of 5 years), however, I am logged into WoW in a different zone as Iā€™m typing this, watching a stream on the 2nd monitor and having no issues at all, despite a reboot happening while in the Chamber of Heart before I made this thread. Iā€™ve also been doing raids with 20+ players and several dungeons without the reboot happening, so if the problem would be the PSU it seems weird to me that it wouldnā€™t happen in more demanding situations in the game, but rather only in the chamber zone (even at night with few players there).

Any help greatly appreciated. Let me know if thereā€™s something I can add to the thread to help with troubleshooting.

2

Have you tried playing in bordered windowed mode? or turning down the graphics just to see if it happens? I was having crashing issues randomly when using full screen mode about 3 months ago where my pc would freeze up. However that issue just randomly went away without doing anything but updating my graphics card drivers as they came out.

3

A hard restart of the PC suggests a hardware failure occuring and if happening while gaming would typically indicate an issue with the graphics card. Thereā€™s a whole host of reasons why this might happen but sadly this wouldnt be something within our normal scope of support.

You can try to take a look at your power settings, PSU or Graphics card but as Baltic referred to, you can do the simple stuff of trying different graphics settings to see if that helps.

With hardware issues, it can be tricky so if you run out of troubleshooting or if you feel uncomfortable doing anything further, I would recommend searching for a local PC specialist or friend perhaps that is comfortable with these things.

Fingers crossed you can get this fixed soon! :crossed_fingers:

4

Update:

As for both of your suggestions, power settings and such were some of the first settings I fiddled with before I made this thread. I have also always played WoW with lower graphic settings despite having the hardware to play it on very high settings, because I valued the performance more than the looks in this game. So I canā€™t see that being the cause of the problem either.

Since I made this thread I have tried a large number of different ways in an attempt to fix the issue with little luck. My PC is booting and running fine with all other types of applications and programs, apart from WoW. I tested several games during the last week, including running GPU intensive games like The Witcher 3 on the highest settings possible for 10+ minutes straight with no issues whatsoever.

Today I went to a couple of local PC repair shops as well as discussing with an old PC technician in my family on the phone. From my description of the problem, they all shared the same opinion about the cause. They said they are 99% sure that this is not hardware-related, and that this issue is likely caused by some conflict between the specific application in question (World of Warcraft) and some driver (either some updated Windows 10 driver, GPU driver, audio driver, etc.).

So today I have attempted to once again do clean uninstalls of GPU and audio drivers using Display Driver Uninstaller in Windows Safe Mode, and then reinstalling the drivers I need while the PC is disconnected from the internet so it doesnā€™t automatically install something from the Microsoft Store. So far I have not had any reboots since, but I donā€™t think Iā€™m safe until considerable time have passed without any reboots.

A guildie of mine said he experienced the same issue, which he fixed by doing the same process of properly uninstalling graphics drivers. However, he mentioned yesterday that the problem returned for him and rebooted his PC in Orgrimmar. My own reboots the last week are no longer contained to the Chamber of Heart, but also happened in Mythic+ and Horrific Visions. Is this something that might be worth investigating, Blizzard?

5

Certainly would be something I could get investigated and I thank you for coming back with such a detailed response on the matter. Itā€™s good to hear that things are running smoothly for now though and I hope the same for your guildie too.

Due to the nature of getting this looked into, I may not be able to share more updates on the outcome but certainly it will be looked into from our side.

6

Thank you for the quick responses, and I hope you and your colleagues are able to find something related to it while it is only affecting a small number of people.

To possibly help narrow the search, my PC currently uses:

Windows 10 Version 2004 (OS Build 19041.388)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB (Driver version 451.67, driver type DCH)
Asus Z97-AR Motherboard (IntelĀ® Graphics Accelerator Driver V10.18.15.4248 and Audio: REALTEK HM_TUF V6.0.1.7848. However, note that my MB graphics are disabled as of yesterday and so shouldnā€™t have a driver installed, and Iā€™ve let Windows automatically install an audio driver, so not currently using the realtek one mentioned.)
Asus Xonar U3 USB soundcard (Driver Ver.8.1.8.2164 ; Audio Center Version : ver.0.3.0.69)

Thanks again and have a nice day.

1 Like
7

I am the guildie he spoke of, having the same issue in Orgrimmar and Vision of Orgrimmar. Everywhere else is fine, just canā€™t do spent too much time in Orgrimmmar and Vision of Orgrimmar.

My system is little bit older, but has not much different specs.
Windows 10 Pro (OS build 10.0.1904)
Intel Core i5-4590 3.30Ghz
ASUS H97M-PLUS
ASUS GTX970, Driver Version 27.21.14.5148

Edit: Just changed from DX12 to DX11 Legacy as someone mentioned it fixes some issues for him. I go to Orgrimmar and within two minutes I am back on the black screen.

Edit 2: It also seems to happen in Zuldazar now.

8

Itā€™s happening now at an increasing rate, 6 times in a row within a time span of 30 minutes, varying from point of login to crash, the last time being instantly when logging in.

9

I had a similar issue myself.
Started with Path of Exile on steam. Any bow skill would crash my game, but other skills would be good for hours.
Bf said ā€˜update your drivers, hunā€™ so I went to the newest one, 451 nvidia

Boom crash still issues. So I shrugged, its PoE, that thing crashes on the odd league, itā€™s free so Meh, play other stuff.
Then 7days to die crashed it, new install. Moved about, changed gamma and wham, bsod.
Maybe its cause it was experimental branch. Fine. Uninstall for space.

And War for the Overworldā€¦
Finaly, I started to crash my wow also in org. Just flying about for between 10 to 30mins.

Checked memory, came up clean. Defragged the HDD, got a couple days of respite.
But again, it started crashing.
We figured it was ether the HDD on the way out or the graphics card.
My cards a hand me down, sweet little thing was an upgrade to my original 550Ti when my man upgraded his, so I canā€™t really moan.

Lucky for me, my old boss had a spare which came out of a junker. Fan wasnā€™t turning, but that was fixable with a little bending of the casing. Same model but other brand as my old hand me down.
(Went into ask how much HDDs and cards were, nothing new but ā€˜hey, if you can get the fan working, this might last till I can get something orderedā€™)

So, I know its longass winded but its for context. All those crashes ect, slowly it got worse over time.
If you can, try swapping out your graphics card. Might be the start of it dying on you, like it was on mine.

And remember to choose custom install for drivers, tick that little box for ā€œclean installā€ to make sure it removes everything.
If ya donā€™t use HDMI for your graphics cause youā€™re on a monitor not a TV, might be worth disabling the ā€˜nvidia HD audioā€™ device in device manager too, I have had that cause a crash before now due to it trying to spit out sounds, with no place to send em to.

10

I understand that it can be the GPU, but why is it just occuring for World of Warcraft and not in newer games such as Fallout 76 and Call of Duty Warzone for me? Those games are much more demanding than WoW.

I currently do not have any other GPU and my income is too low to currently afford a new one. So I really hope it is software related.

11

Do you have any friends that might let you try a spare?
Even if its just an hour or two, at least ya would know if it still kept crashin on you after swapping cards.

Otherwise, have you tried taking it out, cleaning the fan if it has one, and the pci-e slot it came out of, then popping it back in again? Dust can be a demon sometimes when I comes to PCs and just a mote in the wrong place on one of the onary machineā€™s can make you want to swear up a storm

(Been there myself, cussed a few of them out too lol. Gota love that trick of swearing at things in whatever language the country their parts came from. Used to work great for my mum and the envelope maker machine, but then, it was a century old German one, and she used to watch ww2 movies. Me, I have to use stuff from firefly >.< cause the parts all come from China lol)

12

Hello again, Blizzard.

I got a moment of respite lasting about 3 days since my last post before the forced reboots started happening again. This time it was even worse, however, as now the reboots seem to happen mostly on my character select screen and it will also cause WoW to completely reset all of its settings, including addon configurations. Luckily for me I did have an external drive connected with a week old backup of WoW on it, so I was able to get back most of my settings that way. My PC kept rebooting every time I got to the character select screen until, weirdly, I disconnected that external drive. I also had a forced reboot happen during a work-in-progress cinematic while playing the Shadowlands beta for a bit.

Now itā€™s been about 3-4 more days since those reboots happened, but once again another reboot just happened on the character select screen and reset all my settings in WoW once more (the exteral drive is not connected this time, so cannot be the cause). Iā€™m getting extremely weary of this issue and Iā€™m debating just stopping to play WoW for the foreseeable future because of this.

As long as this issue has the potential of being something software-related Iā€™m not ready to start spending money on ordering different PC parts to start randomly testing to see if it could be hardware-related. I was planning to buy a new PC in a year or two, but Iā€™m not going to advance those plans because of one game, when other games are running completely fine still on my current PC. I run the risk of spending lots of money to exchange parts or buy a completely new PC, and still have the same issue happen in WoW because it was not hardware-related.

13

Which firewall are you using?
Have you tried disabling it and see if it helps?