Random PC reboots after new grafics driver was installed

@Sophylis  Does your computer automatically restart, or does it shut down?  Do you see any BlueScreens?  A good place to start would be by running a dxdiag; you can attach the results directly to a post.

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

It actually shuts off, stays off a few seconds, then boots up right away again, as if nothing happened. No bluescreen, no error message at all. If i do anything else than playing sims4 after rebooting (even playing other games) it keeps working. As soon as i play Sims 4, it does a repeat of this random shutdown sooner or later.

I downloaded the oldest driver from the nvidia archive they still had (still newer than the one i had), and installed it. Did not get around to testing how it would behave with that yet though. Lacking the time for that currently. Really hope it works again... it totally sucks to have those random reboots out of nowhere. Even more weird as it only happens in the combination of new drivers + sims 4, everything else works just fine.

I did do the dxdiag though (with this older driver already installed). Wonder if it will be able to tell you more.

@Sophylis  You're right, no BlueScreens.  This makes a hardware issue more likely, although it is interesting that the issue only surfaced with a newer GPU driver.  Still, the best place to start is with some hardware monitoring.  You can download hwinfo (the free versions are fine) from here:

https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

If you'd rather not install it, just get the portable version.  (If you do want the installer, be sure to click the green button, not the orange one.)  Unzip it, launch it, make sure "sensors only" is checked, then click the icon with a sheet of paper and a + sign to start logging.  You can save the file directly to your desktop.  Wait five minutes, then open Origin and launch TS4, and play until you get a restart, or 20 minutes if the old GPU driver works well enough to not trigger a restart.

You can upload the log file to a third party site in .csv format and link it here, or change the format to .txt (logfile.txt, not logfile.csv.txt) and attach it to a post here.

@puzzlezaddictdidn't have time to get to it earlier, cause of my work times. I have the logfile here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b7clm0aklzy3xb3/hwinfo.txt?dl=1

Hope that is what you wanted in the format you wanted. I went back to the oldest archived drivers i found on nvidia, those are still newer than the one i had before. This is 5mins+20mins of logtime, without the crash yet. But that may not mean anything, with the very newest drivers i was able to play for 75minutes before it finally crashed.

Would for sure love to find out what the problem is. So that it can be fixed for good.

Big thanks for your help so far.

@Sophylis  Don't worry about the delay; it's been crazy here too.  I'll look at your log file later today and get back to you.

In the meantime, you can always have hwinfo open and logging while you play.  If you play normally, and you eventually get a crash, you can upload that log too—maybe there will be something obvious.  But it would also help if you noticed any pattern to the crashes, like if it happened when you went back into CAS after playing for a while, or when you loaded a certain lot, that kind of thing.

If there's no pattern, don't worry about it too much.  A PC reboot suggests it's more about hardware than the game, so there might not be anything obvious about the way you play.

@Sophylis  Sorry for the delay in responding; it was a bit crazy on the forums this weekend.

I had some trouble getting your file to open—my log viewer wouldn't even recognize the file, and the backup app cut off some of the data.  I'm not sure why, although I know hwinfo has been updated a couple of times since this version of the log viewer was released.  If you do end up logging another session and uploading it, it would make things easier for me to leave the file in .csv format instead of .txt.  I think.  (Again, I could definitely be doing something wrong here.)

At any rate, it's difficult to be sure what's going on without seeing the results of an actual system crash.  But I did notice that your GPU temps were a bit high.  They weren't in the danger zone, peaking at 78º and mostly running in the 70s.  But given that the GPU core load only briefly went over 70%, that seems a bit high.  It's possible that maxing out the core load could also produce temps high enough to cause a system shutdown.  It's more likely that the card would throttle performance to keep itself cool, but this is still a possibility.

Your processor also ran a bit hot.  Again, nothing concerning by itself, but the core max did hit 80º, again without such load on the CPU that it would be expected.

So if I were in your position, I'd log hwinfo each time I played (no need to save the old ones), and if I did get a system reboot, I'd upload the log file and post again.  In the meantime, clean your CPU and GPU fans.

@puzzlezaddict  no worries, i do not get around to do much of gaming anyways... between work and some friends on the weekends. Thanks for this so far. Will for sure get to do some cleaning then... but not sure when i can do more gaming or make new logs.

There is one more thing i just realized. Sims 4 is the only game installed on my SSD, while all other games are on my classical HDD. Maybe the factor that it happened with the drivers update was just random. After all none of the other games ever causes this behaviour. Is that something a SSD could do or cause?

@Sophylis  Probably not, unless your SSD was failing.  But your log says no drive failures, no drive warnings, and 98% remaining life.  The temperature for the 960 Evo's controller did get a bit hot, running over 70º for the last part of the session, but that's not high enough to cause problems.  And if the Samsung driver was the issue, it would in all likelihood merely cause a BSOD, not a restart of the PC.

Still, I'd be happy to look over a new log whenever you happen to have one.  Obviously, it's only helpful if you got a reboot, but there's no reason you need to test right away.  Whenever you do happen to have a new log, feel free to post back, and I'll take a look.  And if I don't see anything, I'll ask someone else for a second opinion.

@puzzlezaddicti have 2 SSDs in my system.. the samsung one is actually the one that holds my operating system. No Sims 4 is installed on a western digital SSD thats is a normal internal SATA SSD, that Samsung one is a NVMe M.2 one.

@Sophylis  I hate how WD names their drives.  (S.M.A.R.T.: WDC WDS250G1B0A-00H9H0 (173214A017E1) and S.M.A.R.T.: WDC WD20EZRZ-00Z5HB0 (WD-WCC4M7RRX33E), in case you're wondering.)  But the point stands:  There's no drive failure, no drive warning, no excessively high temperatures.

I hope you don't get any more crashes, of course, but if you do, I'll be happy to poke around further.