Hey everyone, I've been having a really frustrating issue with my PC. It all started after I went into the BIOS to enable secure boot due to some games requiring it. Ever since then, my PC has been freezing at random times, even during boot-up. I've tried a bunch of troubleshooting steps but can't seem to figure it out. Here's what I know: My system will freeze randomly, and unlike a typical CPU crash, there's no BSOD. The screens remain on, but I can't interact with the mouse or keyboard, and the fans keep running. I checked the event viewer, but there's no record of what happens during the crashes.
Here's a rundown of what I've attempted so far:
- Cleaned out the ventilation since I thought it might be a temperature issue, but there wasn't much dust.
- Monitored the temperatures while gaming; nothing ever exceeded 82°C shortly, which seems fine.
- Disabling secure boot and deleting keys didn't help.
- Cleared temp files and ran a self-test on my SSD (which unfortunately failed).
- I'm currently trying to roll back an NVIDIA driver update I did today.
My PC is about 4.5 years old, and it hasn't had liquid cooling replaced in a while (now I realize that might be an issue). I'm a content creator/streamer, so it gets a lot of use. Here are my specs:
- Intel Core i9-10900K
- MPG Z490 Gaming PLUS
- 64 GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
Any advice would be super appreciated!
2 Answers
It sounds like you're having quite the frustrating time! First things first, have you checked for any crash dump files? You can find them in C:WindowsMinidump. If you can boot into Windows, it’d be great to zip those files and upload them to a file sharing site like catbox.moe or mediafire.com for analysis. Those dump files will give us a clearer idea of what’s going wrong. Also, consider changing your dump settings to ensure small memory dumps are enabled—you want to get as much data as possible! If you don’t have any dump files, there might be a different underlying issue to explore.
Have you noticed any patterns in those "random intervals" of freezing? Like, does it happen more frequently during intense tasks like gaming or just randomly while navigating through Windows? Also, if your SSD self-test failed, that could definitely be a red flag. I’d recommend running a benchmark with an app called 'AS SSD' to check the performance and use CrystalDiskInfo to get detailed SMART data. That could point you in the right direction regarding the SSD issue.
That does sound really unpredictable! It might be worth focusing on your SSD then since that could be causing the freezes. Keep me posted on what you find!
That's the thing—it's completely random! It’s frozen after I closed BF2042, while playing Warframe, and even just when clicking around with no game open. It's unpredictable, which makes troubleshooting so much harder.