Hi Guys,
I will first start by apologising - my knowledge of PC’s is somewhat limited.
I stopped playing WoW about 1 year ago. I came back a few weeks ago and have encountered a rather strange problem. Every time I play WoW, for more than say 20/30 minutes, my computer will shut down, like completely black screen and turn off. I play other games (runescape + diablo) with absolutely no issue. I have no idea why this can be. I have seen potentially overheating being an issue? I downloaded some CPU/GPU temp trackers and it looks like they were both around 70 ish average (sometimes reaching 80 max) when they shut down. Never any higher than this from what I’ve seen.
Does any one have any idea what this could be? I have a custom built PC that I have owned for about 2 years now, the specs being:
CPU: AMD FX 6300 6 Core
GPU: Nvidia GeForce 1050 Ti
8gb RAM
I will add that I did encounter this problem before (for one day only) where the PC was randomly shutting down. This was due to a large amount of dust (I have neglected the cleaning aspect) as once I gave the back fan a clean it was absolutely fine. Now it is simply when I run wow.
Any help would be so much appreciated as it’s annoying I cant play wow!
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That is most likely the reason for the shutdown.
Those temps are over the max safe temp of 70° as AMD specified it on their website.
The FX CPUs can not handle the same high temps as Intel or the new Ryzen.
Clean your fans, case etc.
Might even have to reapply thermal paste.
But don’t spend any more money on that old and very slow CPU (even back then the FX had a bad rep especially for games like WoW).
As Kiyuki suggests it’s most likely that the maximum safe temperature is exceeded. You can restart your PC and go in the BIOS to perhaps be able to see what the exact temperature is that your PC will automatically trigger a shutdown at. I would advise you to NOT alter these settings if it’s possible unless you wish to throw all of your PC’s components in the garbage bin tomorrow.
Doing some maintenance on your PC is never a bad idea, you can also try running WoW with minimum settings and addons. Or both of the above.
Or he could just limit the FPS to 60 if not already done… if that does not help then 30 (the CPU won’t do much more anyways in more demanding scenarios).
I understand that the CPU may be old, but I used to run the game on max settings at high FPS without issue. I don’t get how this could have changed so drastically in like 9 months.
When was the last time you cleaned out your computer?
Also, have you renewed the cooler paste on the CPU since you bought it?
It sounds like the computer is overheating.
Another prime cause of spontaenous shutdowns is an old and failing power supply. When the CPU suddenly demands a higher amount of this new fangled thing called “Electricity”, older PSU’s find themselves struggling to supply it, so the motherboard shuts down to protect the PC.
PSU problems though are notoriously hard to diagnose.
Thing is, you probably didn’t check the CPU temperature when it worked before. It might have already been pretty high and just now, it is exceeding the threshold where your PC decides to shut down.
70ish to 80ish is pretty high for CPU temperatures. Depending on how old your PC is (assuming you never changed the thermal paste between your CPU and the CPU cooler) chances are that the thermal paste dried up and does not properly conduct heat, leading to the CPU overheating.
Applied some thermal pasting as per some suggestions and is now running @ like 30/40 degs and I am able to play at Max without shutdown! No new CPU needed after all as some others suggested 
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Glad it’s all sorted, i had an FX 6300 a while back and it was a space heater when i overclocked it. I never had a shut down though as i made sure to keep my temps below 65 on full load. If you have any more issues with shut downs it may just be worth investing in a low end Ryzen CPU and B450 board(About twice the single core performance of the FX series), then eventually upgrade your GPU to something a little more powerful.
The only problem with FX series is they have pretty low single core performance so even a 1050 puts the cpu load pretty high. you could also increase your resolution or decrease the in game FPS limit to take a little strain off of the CPU if this ever happens again.