I've been troubleshooting an intermittent crash for months and have replaced or tested nearly every major component. During gaming, my main DisplayPort monitor suddenly turns black while the HDMI monitor becomes solid green. After about one or two seconds, the entire computer reboots and starts normally through POST and Windows. There is no blue screen, error message, useful dump, or consistent Event Viewer entry, and automatic restart is disabled.
The crash can occur within an hour or not happen for several hours. I've also seen occasional recoverable AMD driver timeouts involving 0x117 VIDEO_TDR_TIMEOUT_DETECTED and 0x141 VIDEO_ENGINE_TIMEOUT_DETECTED, referencing amdkmdag.sys, although I'm not sure whether those are connected to the full reboot.
The current system includes a Ryzen 7 5800X, temporarily replaced with a Ryzen 5 5500 for testing, an RX 9070 XT, an MSI B550 motherboard, 32GB of DDR4, and an ASUS TUF 1000W Gold power supply. I previously used an RX 7800 XT and have also replaced the motherboard, PSU, CPU cooler, case, displays, cables, and peripherals. I've tested different RAM configurations, run MemTest and OCCT CPU/GPU/VRAM/combined tests, reinstalled Windows multiple times, tried several AMD driver versions with DDU, disabled XMP, used stock BIOS settings, forced PCIe Gen 3, and changed the mains and extension-lead arrangement.
Synthetic stress tests pass, but the crash has survived what is essentially a complete system rebuild. The consistent display sequence makes me wonder whether the cause is outside the PC itself, such as the electrical circuit or another device connected to it. Has anyone seen this pattern or know of a way to isolate the remaining common cause?
1 Answer
The fact that the same failure survived multiple CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards, power supplies, Windows installations, and cables makes an external power issue worth investigating rather than replacing more components. A faulty appliance or unstable circuit can cause a brief disturbance that synthetic tests won’t reproduce. Try running the computer from a genuinely different electrical circuit, ideally at another location, with unnecessary appliances disconnected. If the crash disappears there, investigate the original circuit, outlet, extension lead, or nearby equipment. The AMD timeout errors could also be a symptom of the display or power interruption rather than the root cause.
That possibility seemed unlikely at first, but the failure pattern makes more sense if the computer is reacting to something outside the hardware itself. I’m going to test the system at another location and compare the results before replacing anything else.