My older gaming PC was working normally until a few days ago. Now it randomly becomes completely unresponsive during games and occasionally while idle, forcing me to hold the power button or restart it. During gaming, the CPU reaches about 52°C and the GPU about 75°C, with roughly 8 GB of RAM still available. I have already performed a clean installation of the graphics driver, but the problem remains. Event Viewer and Reliability Monitor only report that Windows was not shut down correctly because I had to force the restart. I have also noticed some VSS and certificate-enrollment errors, though I'm not sure whether they are related. The system uses an MSI B450M PRO-VDH MAX motherboard, an RTX 2060, a Ryzen 5 2600X, and 16 GB of DDR4 memory. What should I test next?
3 Answers
Try returning every component to completely stock settings, including memory profiles such as XMP. Even if you never manually overclocked anything, automatic boost or memory settings can become unstable after a BIOS or driver change. As a diagnostic, you can temporarily lower the CPU and GPU clocks or power limit and see whether the freezes stop. If you do not know how, use the motherboard BIOS for CPU and memory settings, and a GPU utility for the graphics card; change only one thing at a time and record the original values.
The errors shown after the freeze are probably symptoms rather than the cause. Windows cannot record the real failure when the entire machine locks up, so it only logs the forced shutdown afterward. Reliability Monitor may still show the exact time of the crash, but the most useful next steps are RAM testing, SSD health checks, checking the PSU connections, and testing with another known-good power supply if possible.
Since the temperatures look reasonable, check the hardware rather than assuming it is a driver problem. Test the RAM with MemTest86, check the SSD’s health with a SMART tool such as CrystalDiskInfo, and see whether the system is stable with one memory stick at a time. If those tests pass, the power supply, motherboard, or graphics card could be the cause.
I only meant that I reinstalled the graphics driver, not Windows. Event Viewer just reports an unexpected shutdown because I have to force the restart.
I have never changed the clocks myself, so I’ll need to learn how to check whether any automatic settings are enabled before changing them.