I built or bought this PC about two months ago, and it has been mostly reliable except for intermittent crashes while gaming. The problem has occurred in World of Warcraft, Dead Space, and Split Fiction, but it does not happen every time or under one obvious set of conditions. I sometimes have a movie or football match playing on my second monitor, although the crashes also happen when I am not doing anything unusual. CPU and GPU temperatures look normal, and Windows and the hardware drivers are up to date. The system runs Windows 11 and has a Ryzen 5 7500F, RTX 5070 Windforce, 32GB of Kingston DDR5-6000 memory, a Gigabyte B650M Gaming Plus WiFi motherboard, a Kingston 1TB NVMe SSD, an 850W SilverStone Gold power supply, and a Thermalright Assassin X 120 cooler. After the latest crash, Event Viewer reported that Windows had rebooted without shutting down cleanly, suggesting the system stopped responding, crashed, or briefly lost power. What would be the best way to diagnose this?
2 Answers
Since temperatures are fine, test the components one at a time instead of focusing only on drivers. Run the RAM at its default speed with EXPO disabled, try a clean graphics-driver installation, and check whether the crashes continue with the second-monitor video closed. If the machine still abruptly restarts under gaming load, the power supply, its cables, or the graphics card become more suspicious. Windows Reliability Monitor can also show whether the crashes are consistently hardware-related.
That Event Viewer message is generic, but because the PC is rebooting rather than showing a normal game error, I would first investigate power delivery and system stability. Reseat the GPU and both power connections, make sure the graphics card power cable is fully inserted, and check that the motherboard power connectors are secure. If you have enabled EXPO or changed any BIOS settings, temporarily return the BIOS to its default settings and test again. You can also run a memory test and a combined CPU/GPU stress test to see whether the reboot can be reproduced outside the games.
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