Should I Upgrade My Drive?

Going off of memory at the moment...

CPU: 8-core AMD at about 3.3GHz

GPU: Radeon RX 470

RAM: 16GB DDR3

Storage: Toshiba DT01ACA100 HDD

Hard drive specs...

Capacity: 1 TB

Rotational Speed: 7200 rpm

Cache: 32 MB

Interface: SATA 6.0 Gb/s

Single Track Seek Time (Read): 0.6 ms

Single Track Seek Time (Write): 0.8 ms

Now, when I first got my PC, it had 8GB of memory, and it was staying at 7.7/8 on the usage during DCS play. I have very frequent crashes. Nearly unplayable crashes. I thought it was the memory, so I upgraded to 16GB. It's still crashing. I am blissfully lucky to get 15 minutes of play in.

So now I'm thinking it's my $45 HDD. But one thing stumps me; my old laptop (with a Toshiba MQ01ABD100) ran DCS with little to no crashes, and it's a 5400RPM drive. So is it really my hard drive that needs to get upgraded/replaced? I'm unsure. My laptop with a slower drive had no problems, while my PC with a slightly faster drive is horrific.

Help! What do I do?

Crashes, huh? Well, that's obviously not all right. As you found out, it's clearly not the memory, if you're not even out of memory. It also certainly isn't the hard drive, that's fully irrelevant. I'm guessing you have a Western Digital or Seagate like anyone else, that's typical. Hard drives only affect loading and never cause crashes unless they're about to break apart completely.

It's unlikely that it's a hardware problem at all. Do other games crash? Any other programs?

The typical troubleshooting tips are restarting your computer, updating your drivers, cleaning your computer, re-installing DCS, re-installing your operating system, and stuff like that.

If it doesn't work, create a thread in the appropriate part of the forum (for crashes, around here somewhere) and submit whatever crash logs the game may have generated to the moderators.

Crashes, huh? Well, that's obviously not all right. As you found out, it's clearly not the memory, if you're not even out of memory. It also certainly isn't the hard drive, that's fully irrelevant. I'm guessing you have a Western Digital or Seagate like anyone else, that's typical. Hard drives only affect loading and never cause crashes unless they're about to break apart completely.

It's unlikely that it's a hardware problem at all. Do other games crash? Any other programs?

The typical troubleshooting tips are restarting your computer, updating your drivers, cleaning your computer, re-installing DCS, re-installing your operating system, and stuff like that.

If it doesn't work, create a thread in the appropriate part of the forum (for crashes, around here somewhere) and submit whatever crash logs the game may have generated to the moderators.

I have had IL-2 BoS crash a lot as well. That and DCS are the only two intensive games I have. I have updated many of my drivers, though I'm not sure if all of them. I do have many many crash logs, however. I will continue this elsewhere. Thanks.

When you say "crash" does DCS just quit on you? Do you get BSOD? Or does the PC power off? I would start with making sure that your USB drivers are all up to date. Make sure there are no misbehaving hardware in device manager. I would try deleting the c:\users\username\SAVED GAMES folder (but make a backup copy since it has your logs, joystick configs etc), I would try doing a repair on DCS.

I would boot a USB Linux and check from there. If it is your windows nothing will ever happen in Linux. if it is your hardware, you can likely trigger that from Linux as well.

Prime95 runs on Linux, so does stresstestapp ( from google itself ).

I would boot a different OS and check if it happens regardless of OS = likely hardware issue

You can also stressttest from within windows, if it fails while priming or doing any non-GPU relevant stuff than i would suggest you inspect your board visually for caps going south, DUST,

old TIM, RAM out and in again, PSU maybe on the edge ? Will the PSU hold maximum power draw or will that trigger something ?.

For Windows, thewre are many good stress testers. Prime95, OCCT, IntelBurnTestv2 (IBTv2), Furmark, RealBench, Handbreak...etc... If anyone triggers an immediate shutdown I would certainly try a different PSU.

okay im thinking if you have 16gb of ram pretty much everything of dcs should be loaded aka already loaded into ram and vram

does other software run ok? running up another os is maybe a better test but.

there are some issues with 2.5 but results seem different, until tonight i had no real issues with 2.5 apart from maybe the odd crash but mostly on servers it happens right.:D

have you checked for memory leak with taskmanager?

sorry about typing but tonight windows suddenly does not recognise keyboard and rift sensor :cry:

so typing with mouse,...