I'm troubleshooting an Alienware Aurora R10 Ryzen Edition with a Ryzen 9 5900, 32 GB of DDR4 memory, a 1 TB SK hynix NVMe drive, and an RTX 3080 that has been in use for about six years. The problem began with modded Minecraft and now affects several other games, which crash shortly after loading into their menus. Event Viewer repeatedly reports LiveKernelEvent 141 errors. Sometimes the display goes black and the game simply returns to the desktop instead of showing a Windows crash screen.
I ran System File Checker, which repaired a corrupted file, but the crashes continued after rebooting and rescanning. I removed and reseated the graphics card, reinstalled Windows and NVIDIA drivers, changed the DisplayPort connection, and started experimenting with lowering the GPU clock. None of that has helped so far. The crashes occur around 47°C, while the card reaches above 60°C during other tests, so overheating does not seem obvious.
The issue started before I attempted a Dell BIOS update, and I don't think that update actually completed. It caused pop-ups and severe lag, requiring a hard reset, so I'm hesitant to try it again. What would be the best way to determine whether the RTX 3080 is failing, or whether this is caused by a driver, BIOS, power issue, or Windows corruption?
1 Answer
Since the crashes began before the BIOS attempt, that update probably isn’t the original cause. LiveKernelEvent 141 usually points toward a graphics driver or GPU-related timeout, but the event by itself doesn’t prove the card is defective. A useful next step would be testing the card with a demanding GPU benchmark and checking whether the driver resets or the system crashes there too. If possible, testing the RTX 3080 in another known-good system, or testing a different graphics card in this machine, would give the clearest answer.
The fact that it happens at low temperatures makes overheating less likely, but it doesn’t rule out a failing card, unstable power delivery, or memory on the GPU. I’d avoid repeatedly forcing BIOS updates until the hardware issue is isolated.