My computer crashes unpredictably while I'm gaming, but it happens most often in Rainbow Six Siege. Event Viewer only reports that the shutdown was unexpected. The crashes can happen several times in one day, then not occur again for a week or two; once, the system crashed again before it had even finished booting. I recently cleaned the PC and replaced the thermal paste, so I'm not sure temperatures are the cause. All drivers are up to date, but I don't know how to test whether the power supply is failing.
My system has an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, Ryzen 9 7900X, 32 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5-7200 memory, a 2 TB Samsung SSD, and an MSI X670E Carbon WiFi motherboard. The power supply is either 750 W or 850 W, but I need to check the exact model. What should I test first?
3 Answers
Check whether the motherboard BIOS is very old. BIOS updates for AM5 systems can include important CPU microcode, memory-compatibility, and voltage fixes. Updating it solved similar game-specific crashes for me, so it’s worth checking the release notes and updating carefully.
Monitor the system while gaming with a hardware-monitoring tool such as HWiNFO. Check CPU and GPU temperatures, clock speeds, power readings, and whether there are WHEA hardware errors. Also find the exact power-supply model rather than relying only on its wattage. If changing the memory settings and updating the BIOS don’t help, test the RAM and consider trying a known-good PSU.
The DDR5-7200 setting is a likely suspect. The Ryzen 9 7900X’s memory controller may not be stable at that speed, especially with EXPO enabled. As a test, turn EXPO off and run the memory at its default settings. If the crashes stop, try 6800 MT/s or, preferably, around 6000 MT/s with conservative timings. On Ryzen 7000, faster memory can sometimes perform worse because the memory controller and fabric may switch to a less efficient ratio.
I’m not sure how to change the memory speed, but I’ll look for the EXPO and DRAM-frequency settings in the BIOS.
I haven’t updated the BIOS since 2023, so that may be a strong possibility. I’ll check which version I’m running.