My PC completely locks up after about 20–45 minutes in Risk of Rain 2 or Subnautica: Below Zero. The screen freezes, the audio loops, keyboard shortcuts stop working, and even Caps Lock no longer responds. I have to force the system off with the power button. This does not happen in other games such as Elden Ring, Dark Souls 1–3, CS2, League of Legends, Slay the Spire, or Left 4 Dead.
My system has an Intel i7-10700F, RTX 3060, 16 GB DDR4 consisting of one 16 GB stick currently running at 2133 MT/s, an ASRock CML-HDV/M.2 TPM motherboard, a be quiet! Pure Power 12 M 750 W PSU, and Windows 11. The BIOS is AMI P1.20 from September 2022.
I have already run Windows Memory Diagnostic, Prime95, FurMark, OCCT Power, and HWiNFO checks. I tried different RAM slots, lower graphics settings, reinstalling the GPU driver and Windows, verifying game files, disabling HAGS and overlays, forcing DirectX 11, using NVIDIA Debug Mode, enabling Intel Speed Shift, and moving the games between drives. Temperatures and voltages looked normal during stress tests, and Windows has not recorded an obvious crash. What else could cause these two games to hard-lock the entire system?
3 Answers
I would not assume this is simply a lack of RAM. Windows and games can run acceptably with 16 GB, and your reported usage of roughly 70–77% in Risk of Rain 2 does not indicate that the system is exhausting memory. A sudden hard lock without a visible memory spike points more toward a driver, firmware, PCIe, power, or hardware-stability problem than ordinary RAM capacity. Testing with two matching DIMMs, updating the motherboard BIOS, and checking the GPU and PSU under the specific games would be more useful than only watching total RAM usage.
The power supply is worth investigating, even though 750 W should be enough on paper. Those particular games may be creating transient power or GPU-load behavior that your other games do not. I would also check whether a newer BIOS is available for the motherboard. Running a single RAM module is unusual too, so memory configuration may be contributing to the instability.
Both games use Unity, so that common factor is worth following up on. After the next freeze, check C:WindowsLiveKernelReports and %LocalAppData%CrashDumps. A lockup with a repeating sound can sometimes generate a live-kernel report even when normal crash logs are empty. Also inspect Event Viewer under Windows Logs > System for WHEA-Logger events 18 or 19, which can point to CPU, PCIe, or memory problems. Kernel-Power 41 will usually only confirm that the machine was shut down unexpectedly, so it is not necessarily the cause.
Your memory is also running at the conservative default speed of 2133 MT/s. If the module and motherboard support it, try enabling the appropriate XMP profile, but test stability afterward rather than assuming it fixes the issue.
I checked those folders and they were either empty or only contained unrelated crash dumps. Event Viewer only shows warnings saying the issue was recovered, and Kernel-Power 41 just records that I had to press the power button. I will still test the XMP profile.
I also tested with background applications and browsers closed. RAM usage stayed well below the limit, so I have not seen anything suggesting a multi-gigabyte memory spike before the freezes.