While playing Elden Ring last night, my PC crashed for the first time. Today, the monitor and keyboard suddenly stopped receiving a signal, but the computer itself stayed powered on. Holding the power button for over a minute did nothing. Around the time the monitor and keyboard disconnected, the fans seemed to become much louder. I've unplugged the PC from the wall for now. It was rebuilt by a computer shop earlier this year, so I assumed the thermal paste and cooling were fine. Is this likely a serious hardware problem, and what should I check before powering it back on?
1 Answer
A sudden jump to maximum fan speed can happen when the graphics card crashes or detects a fault, causing it to fall back to a failsafe fan profile. Once the system is fully powered down, check that the GPU and its power cables are seated properly, then consider reinstalling the graphics driver with DDU before installing a fresh driver. The card sounds like an AMD Radeon 9060 16GB Sapphire Pulse, if that model identification is correct.
The monitor and keyboard disconnecting is what I meant by the problem starting. I also noticed that my AMD chipset drivers were out of date, so updating those may have been the cause.