Lately my PC has started crashing while it plays videos. It freezes completely, screen frozen and not responding to any input (keyboard, mouse), I mean I cannot change TTY (alt + ctrl + F(1-2-...)), and it cannot even respond to alt + PrntScr + REISUB. I have to force power off by holding down the power button.

After I reboot I have tried checking all logs available and I cannot find anything logged right before the incident. Last entries are always different and not indicating anything.

I suspect it has to do with the graphics card but I'm looking for ways that I can dig deeper on that and confirm it or not.

What else should I check? How can I find more info?

OS: Lubuntu 22.04.3 LTS (latest updates) I'm using the nvidia proprietary drivers (nvidia-driver-390)

UPDATE:

First of all thank you all for your input and fresh ideas. Now I've already tried some of them and I will continue with the other ones until I get some results.

till now I have tried

  • memtest and it didn't show any errors.
  • boot from a live distro and see if problem also occurs. Well it didn't occur but on the live distro you cannot change the graphics driver. So it was using the open source nouveau driver, also it didn't happen during the 1 hour I let it play. The thing is that it never was punctual even before. It could happen during the first hour or the third or sometime later.

Next steps are to

  • open the case and clean it up to remove the possibility of high temp because of that,
  • change my drivers to be the nouveau and try again,
  • try with only the onboard GPU on,
  • remove extra disks to reduce the load of the PSU

thank you all again.

    • InputZero@lemmy.ml
      ·
      11 months ago

      This! Try this! Don't go taking your computer apart until you try this. It's great advice.

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      ·
      11 months ago

      Not really. Distros usually build the same software slightly differently. If the bug is in a piece of software used by all distros such as the Linux kernel, it won't make a difference.

  • ourob@discuss.tchncs.de
    ·
    11 months ago

    If you have another pc, ssh from it to the problem machine and run sudo dmesg -w. That should show kernel messages as they are generated and won’t rely on them being written to disk.

    • gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de
      ·
      11 months ago

      i will try it but I'm quite confident that it will be unresponsive/not reachable since if the kernel was listening it would respond to the alt + PrntScr + REISUB by unmounting the drives and I would see it when I examine the logs afterwards

      • ourob@discuss.tchncs.de
        ·
        11 months ago

        To be clear, dmesg -w should be run before you do anything to cause the crash. It will continuously print kernel output until you press ctrl+c or the kernel crashes.

        In my experience, a crashing kernel will usually print something before going unresponsive but before it can flush the log to disk.

  • mortrek@lemmy.ml
    ·
    11 months ago

    Can you be more specific when you say "plays videos"?

    Like in vlc, or YouTube, or something else? What videos? Like, 4k hevc videos, or literally anything?

    • gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de
      ·
      11 months ago

      mostly on youtube, usually at 720p30fps. I think if I go to 60fps it crashes even faster. Also I've tried watching on freetube and on firefox + mpv, but it can crash in all combinations

  • mnmalst@lemmy.zip
    ·
    11 months ago

    I was in a similar situation not too long ago and couldn't find anything to fix it either at first. One thing that was high on my list was changing my PSU since a defect or weak one often seems to be a problem in such cases. Besides a general hardware failure of course. If it's the hardware that could be anything really. Motherboard, RAM, GPU, PSU. PSU is the easiest to switch tho, so if you go that route I would try that first.

    Anyways, I never had to do this cause in my case, believe it or not, a BIO update fixed my problem. I am still not 100% sure what happened but I think the update fixed the GPU voltage distribution or something similar.

    Hope that help at least a little bit.

    • gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de
      ·
      11 months ago

      good idea about the PSU. I hadn't thought of that. The PSU is not any high-performance/high-quality and is already 5 years old. Being unable to provide the required voltage may be a possibility if we accept that the performance degrades in time. (Was working without issues for 5 years in the same PC configuration).

      I think I'll try by first removing the extra HDDs so reducing the load and check again. Thanks for your input

  • qjammer@lemmy.ml
    ·
    11 months ago

    I read you mentioned firefox. I had a similar experience a while ago, related to this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1704774#c13