Start Dota = crash: Monitor turns off and USB devices turn off

Gaming
1

I’ve been experiencing this issue for quite a while now. Not sure when it started. Maybe 6 months or more. And it’s intermittent too so that also makes it strange in my book.

a couple of times a week, when I start dota, after a few seconds of normal loading time, my monitor goes into low power mode after saying no signal, then my USB mouse and keyboard turn off.

If I unplug the keyboard and plug it back in, the rgb lights will turn on but not in the same color. And if I do the same for the mouse, it doesn’t turn on at all.

Usually, this has happened when I get home from work. So I boot up and launch from steam and then grab a drink or something while it loads.

But most recently, I was actually listening to a youtube podcast in the background and when it happened this time around. I heard the audio from the podcast start to sound robotic and stutter/repeat all robotic like for a second before everything “turns off”, even the sound.

Out of all the times this has happened though, there’s nothing ever in windows event viewer (except the warning that I didn’t shut down properly)

The only course of action at this point is to hard reset. Long press the power button, or press the reset button.

Windows 10 (don’t remember the exact build I always update whenever one there’s something available)
Ryzen 1700x 16 GB ram
Gigabyte Aurous k5 Gaming mobo
R9 390 8GB gpu

Any idea what might be going on here? I don’t play a ton of other games, but of all the times this has happened, it’s ONLY been after starting dota.

2

It sounds like a motherboard problem to me. Your RGB and USB devices all route through there.

3

This is such a weird issue, difficult to pin point. What I’d do is:

  • check if the drives in your system are in good shape and don’t have any sign of corruption
  • stress test the CPU and GPU separately (you can use AIDA64 if you didn’t use the trial already or OCCT for the CPU and Heaven for the GPU) to make sure they’re not the culprit. This should also remove the PSU from the equation
  • do a mem test (through AIDA or memtest86+)

If none of these things lead to a repeatable scenario I’d first reset the BIOS to default and see if it keeps happening. If it does still maybe try with an update, just to flush out the old one that might have something that gone bad and last set the CPU to eco mode to check if the VRM is not the culprit.

If all of these further tests don’t lead to anything you need other known good components to start swapping and find what’s damaged.

P.S. an hard lock up like that sounds like there’s something seriously wrong with something major in your system like the motherboard, the CPU or the GPU.