I have a used/imported Dell Precision 5560 with an Intel i7-11850H, 32GB of RAM, and an RTX A2000. It randomly freezes completely, most often during games, but it has also happened while using video-editing software, Visual Studio, and even the normal Windows desktop. When it freezes, nothing responds and I can only recover by holding the power button.
The temperatures do not seem unusually high; one freeze occurred while the system was around 55–60°C. Dell's full and advanced diagnostics reported that all tests passed. CPU and memory stress tests also completed successfully, while GPU testing did not reproduce the problem consistently.
I have already run DISM, checked Windows system files, updated the graphics drivers, tried lowering system performance, changed power and FPS settings, and reviewed Event Viewer. The only consistent entries are Kernel-Power events caused by the forced shutdown, along with some GPU and power-management warnings that do not identify a clear cause.
What else should I investigate? Could this still be a hardware or graphics-driver issue even though the individual tests pass?
1 Answer
Try booting a Linux live environment and use it normally for a while, including the desktop and some graphics activity. If it freezes there too, that points more toward firmware or hardware than Windows. I would also perform a genuinely clean graphics-driver reinstall with Display Driver Uninstaller in Safe Mode, then install a known-stable driver version rather than simply updating over the existing one.
I tried both the Linux live boot and a clean driver installation, but the freezes still occur.