My PC started running painfully slowly immediately after updating an ASRock B550M Steel Legend to BIOS 3.90 and enabling Secure Boot. Windows 11 still boots, but everything is sluggish, including games, Adobe applications, File Explorer, and Chrome. Games run at single-digit FPS, both monitors sometimes lose signal briefly, and some games occasionally launch to a solid green screen.
My system has a Ryzen 7 5800X, RTX 3080 12GB, 32GB DDR4-3200 memory, and a 1000W Thermaltake power supply. I tried changing CSM and Secure Boot, restoring XMP, enabling Above 4G Decoding and Resizable BAR, rolling back to BIOS 3.40, reflashing BIOS 3.90, clearing CMOS, reseating the GPU and cables, reinstalling NVIDIA drivers with DDU, and running DISM cleanup.
Reliability Monitor reported LiveKernelEvent 141 and 117. An OCCT GPU test caused both displays to go black, followed by a system restart. Task Manager showed normal CPU and GPU clocks and usage, while Device Manager reported no problems.
What would you suspect? The issue was ultimately fixed by forcing the PCIe slot from Auto to Gen 3 in the BIOS. It appears the BIOS update reset that setting, and the GPU was unstable using PCIe Gen 4.
3 Answers
Before assuming the GPU is dead, also make sure the RTX 3080 is powered by two separate PCIe cables from the power supply rather than using one daisy-chained cable. If changing the PCIe generation does not help, testing the card in another system would be the next useful step.
The LiveKernelEvent 141 and 117 errors, green screens, display dropouts, and restart during the GPU stress test all point toward a graphics card or PCIe stability problem rather than Windows simply being slow. On B550 systems with an RTX 3080, try forcing the main PCIe slot to Gen 3 instead of Auto or Gen 4. If that resolves everything, the BIOS update likely changed the link mode and exposed a Gen 4 compatibility issue.
It is worth checking CPU clocks too, since some BIOS problems can leave a processor stuck at an unusually low multiplier. However, the display failures and GPU stress-test crash make PCIe or graphics-card stability more likely here than a CPU power-management issue.
That did it. I forced the PCIe slot to Gen 3, and the slow performance, black screens, and crashes all disappeared. The update must have reset the setting to Auto.