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baserock love
Known Participant
March 27, 2024
Question

ONLY while running photoshop computer will randomly just blink off and reboot. This is maddening...

  • March 27, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 826 views

So this has been going on for years and I have spent hundreds of dollars troubleshooting it. I cannot for the life of me figure out what's causing it. What's worse is PS's recovery feature only works about 7/10ths of the time. I'll try to be succinct and lay this out in sections.
System:
OS: Windows 10 Pro
CPU: Ryzen 3700x
GPU: AMD Vega 64
Mobo: MSI B550 A-pro
Ram: 64 gigs of ddr4 running at 3200mhz (Currently 32861 mb allocated for ps in preferences.)
Tablet: Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 + Express Key Remote

Drives: Main PS install drive = Samsung NVME MZVLV512HCJH-000H1  136gb free

Scratch Drive = SPCC 2tb sata ssd 323 gigs free.
Displays: Three displays including my tablet. 

The Issue: 
Pretty much as described. I will be working in PS and without warning and seemingly independent of the use of any tool or function or canvas size or psd size my computer will without warning just blink off, go to a black screen and reboot on it's own. This happens so infuriatingly randomly that I cannot predict it to capture it on video. Sometimes three times a day, sometimes three times a month. This has NEVER happened outside of photoshop. Not during gaming, not during videos, not during internet browsing, not using Maya or Zbrush or any other app or software. I use PS just for illustration and painting so I"m not using anything but the brush tools and basic painting tools.

All the things I have tried to solve it.
-Swapping PSU
-Buying a battery backup USB surge protector thinking the power was unstable in my fairly old apartment.
-Swapping ram to other ram.
-Changing ram speed to default 2133mhz on both sets of tried ram.
-Swapping motherboards
-Going from 32 gigs to 64 gigs of ram.
-Updating bios to latest.
-Updating windows to latest.
-Keeping wacom drivers up to date.
-Keeping GPU drivers up to date.
-Keeping chipset drivers up to date.
-Keeping PS version up to date.
-Making PS ram allocation bigger.
-Making PS ram allocation smaller.
-Testing all my disks for errors in crystaldisk and samsung magician, all pass. 
-Testing all my ram for errors in memtest, both sets/all pass
-Checking windows event reporter for description of error. It's just a generic error that apparently just means "The system unexpectedly shut down."
-Very closely monitoring temps in HWmonitor, all are low and excellent in my watercooled cpu system and clean modern case with four fans. (See attached image)
-Getting a motherboard with a robust NVME drive heat sink that brought my PS drive temp down 20 degrees well below it's operating range at absolute hottest.
-Very closely monitoring system usage, PS is not taxing my system much at all even with the biggest canvases i work on other than ram and even ram usage isn't getting above 70%.

This has been seriously impacting my work for awhile now because ps's recovery feature is the least reliable of any content creation software i've used. I'm praying that somebody can give me some insight into what's causing this so i can resolve it. I try to manual save every five minutes but when I get in the zone i forget sometimes. I have a far less capable laptop and it has never happened on it, that laptop is intel but I need my desktop for using the 10k to 20k canvases i sometimes have to work on. The crash happens whether it's a 3k web illustration or a 20k print illustration.

Any ideas what's causing this and how i can finally recolve it?!

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    davescm
    Community Expert
    davescmCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    March 27, 2024

    Under a modern operating system, like Windows 10, an application crash cannot crash the entire system. However, a hardware fault or a buggy driver can do exactly that. Photoshop does make use of GPU driver calls that may not be used by other applications so given the other tests you have carried out I would start there.

    If you temporarily disable the GPU in Preferences does that stop the crashes? If it does then try rolling back the driver and check if AMD offer an equivalent to NVidia's studio drivers. If you can borrow one to test, try substituting the GPU with a different model.

     

     

    Dave

      B
      baserock loveAuthor
      Known Participant
      March 27, 2024

      By temporarily disable the gpu in preferences do you mean turning off GPU accelleration? This unfortunately disables the rotate tool which I need for my work and these crashes can be so few and far between i simply can't do my job fast enough without the ability to rotate the canvas while i work. I actually did do this for a few days and had to turn it back on because again, i have to use that tool to draw, I didn't get a crash during that time but it's not unusual as again these crashes can sometimes be weeks or months apart. 
      There does appear to be something called the pro drivers for content creators that emphasizes stability. I will wipe my current ones and install those and see what happens. That said please keep this thread unlocked as i might not know for days whether anything I do here works.

      A driver rollback can't be a solution because there's never been a version going back years where this crashing hasn't been an issue. NOt sure how long i've been using photoshopCC but it started with that, I was on cs6 for a long time before that but that started developing more and more issues as it got more and more out of date once support ended, I never had these crashes though and it's definitely been at least a few years since i switched to CC.

      I'm working on trying to locate a gpu to borrow to troubleshoot this but have been unable to so far.

      I'll try the pro drivers and report back if/when this happens again. Thanks for pointing me in the direction of these drivers, fingers crossed it works.

      D Fosse
      Community Expert
      D FosseCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      March 27, 2024

      Disabling the GPU is for diagnostics. It will either confirm or rule out that the problem is the GPU/driver.

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