Hey everyone, I've got a bit of a situation with my PC. I built this setup about a year and a half ago, but I've been having issues for quite a while. I procrastinated on fixing them until now. The only used part I have is my GPU, which I bought from a friend. The core of the problem is that my PC will crash or restart at odd moments. It starts with the screen going black, but I can still hear sounds from Discord for about 10 seconds before it crashes, restarts, or freezes, and I have to turn it off manually. This usually happens when I open menus in games or when I alt-tab. I also experience major frame drops, like 50% every 5-10 seconds, regardless of the game. The crashes generally happen 20-30 minutes after restarting the PC, and it never crashes while I'm just sitting idle. I've cleaned the whole PC and replaced the fans, so overheating shouldn't be the issue, and I've also replaced the thermal paste, but nothing has changed. Any ideas on what could be causing this? My specs are: i7 13700F, NVIDIA 2080 RTX 8GB, 16GB DDR5 5600MHz RAM, 960GB SSD.
1 Answer
It sounds like you might want to take a good look at that used GPU you got. How trustworthy is your friend? Did you test the GPU before buying it to ensure it was in good working condition? Aside from that, the issues could be anything from your RAM to your power supply, a BIOS glitch, a failing SSD, or even some corruption in Windows. Have you tried any other troubleshooting steps beyond what you mentioned?
I’ve known my friend for a long time, and he sold me the GPU because he upgraded and it was just collecting dust. I did make sure the BIOS is up-to-date, and I cleaned the PC and replaced the thermal paste like I mentioned, so I'm not sure what else to look into. I also I made sure all drivers are updated and even reformatted the PC.