I upgraded to a 34-inch 3440×1440 AOC monitor, and since then my PC sometimes goes black and immediately restarts when launching or playing games. My system has a Ryzen 7 5700X, RTX 3060 12GB, ASRock B450M Steel Legend, 16GB DDR4, Corsair CV650 650W power supply, Samsung 980 1TB NVMe drive, a 240mm TeamGroup AIO, and Windows 11.
At 1080p, everything works normally, including Neverness to Everness. At 1440p, that game consistently causes a restart during launch, while other games can trigger it during gameplay. Valorant and Apex Legends have not been tested extensively at the new resolution. The GPU is not overheating, Afterburner reports around 70% usage, and lowering the power limit to 70% did not solve the problem. The system also initially worked after the monitor upgrade before these crashes began.
I tested with XMP enabled and disabled. XMP made the crashes happen faster, but the problem still occurs with the memory running at the default 2133 MHz. Could unstable RAM, a failing GPU, or a power-delivery issue cause a complete black-screen reboot instead of just crashing the game?
1 Answer
The memory is worth investigating first. If enabling XMP makes the problem happen sooner, that points toward unstable RAM or a memory-controller/BIOS compatibility issue. Check the exact RAM kit speed and timings, test each stick individually, and run a proper memory test such as MemTest86. If the system is unstable even at the default 2133 MHz, one of the sticks could be faulty rather than the XMP profile simply being too aggressive.
With XMP enabled the RAM was stable at 3066 MHz according to my testing, but disabling it and running at 2133 MHz did not stop the restarts. I will test the sticks individually to check whether one is defective.