My PC completely locks up during demanding games such as Helldivers 2, Space Marine 2, and Deadlock. The crashes happen randomly after roughly 15–60 minutes: the display freezes, audio stops, and the keyboard and mouse do nothing. I have to force the system off with the power button or by cutting power. After rebooting, Event Viewer shows a WHEA-Logger Event 1 error followed by Kernel-Power 41.
My system has an ASUS PRIME H610M-R D4 motherboard, an Intel Core i5-13400F, an RTX 4060, 32 GB of DDR4 memory, and a RAIDMAX RX-650XTB 650 W power supply. Temperatures look normal.
So far I have updated the BIOS to version 4004, reinstalled and updated Windows and all drivers, tried CPU undervolting and underclocking, reseated the GPU, cleaned the PC, replaced the thermal paste, and ran Intel's processor diagnostic and Windows diagnostics. I also ran hour-long OCCT tests on the major components, but the gaming freezes continue. Could this be an unstable CPU, faulty RAM, or another hardware problem? Is there anything else I should test before replacing expensive parts?
1 Answer
WHEA-Logger Event 1 points toward a hardware-level problem, and the CPU or memory are reasonable suspects when the failure only appears under sustained gaming load. Intel's diagnostic passing does not necessarily rule out an intermittent fault. Since you already tested individual components with OCCT, try running its combined test with the CPU, memory, 3D adaptive, and power tests active together for about an hour. That may reproduce the same power or load conditions as the games.
Also make sure the BIOS is fully current, since newer BIOS versions included stability fixes for some 13th-generation Intel processors. If the combined testing consistently implicates the processor, replacing it with a similar DDR4-compatible model may be less expensive than changing the whole platform.
I would avoid assuming the CPU is definitely dead from WHEA-1 alone. The exact WHEA event details matter, and testing the memory sticks individually plus trying another known-good power supply would help separate CPU, RAM, and power-delivery problems.