Over the past few months, my PC has occasionally powered off and immediately restarted while I was playing games. It has happened about three times this year, including once while playing Dawnwalker. There is no blue screen or error message beforehand. GPU temperatures were around 45–50°C and CPU temperatures around 50–60°C, so overheating does not seem obvious. What should I check to determine whether this is a power supply problem, hardware instability, or something game-related?
2 Answers
Some games can expose a marginal stability problem even when stress tests and other demanding games appear fine. Game-specific crashes do not automatically prove the PSU is failing, especially if the system degrades for a moment before rebooting rather than instantly losing power. I would first record the exact game, load level, Event Viewer entries, and any driver or BIOS changes before replacing expensive parts. Testing with another known-good PSU would be the most useful confirmation if the problem continues.
What CPU, GPU, and power supply are you using? If Event Viewer only shows Kernel-Power 41 with no useful preceding error, the PSU becomes a strong suspect, but it is still worth checking graphics drivers, BIOS settings, overclocks, and hardware stability. Make sure automatic restart is disabled temporarily so Windows has a chance to show an error if a real crash occurs. If Windows creates minidumps, those may also reveal whether a driver is involved.
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