I installed a new AOC 1440p/144Hz monitor and initially everything seemed fine, including playing Cyberpunk in HDR. Later, while updating my Steam library, the system crashed. After rebooting, I saw severe vertical colored lines on the display, and the issue happened again shortly afterward. Switching back to my old 1080p monitor stopped the visual glitches, but now Windows frequently crashes when I use Wi-Fi. Browsing, opening Steam, or doing anything else network-related can trigger a BSOD, while the PC remains stable with Wi-Fi disabled—even during demanding games.
The stop errors have included KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (0x1E), CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED, and KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR (0x7A), with win32kbase.sys listed once. I have not found anything useful in the minidumps. CrystalDisk reports no SSD problems, Windows repair tools found nothing, and I already performed a clean graphics-driver installation with DDU. BIOS settings are at their defaults, and I would prefer not to reinstall Windows unless it is genuinely necessary.
My system has a Ryzen 5 7600X, Intel Arc B580 12GB, ASRock B650 Steel Legend WiFi motherboard, 32GB DDR5-6000 CL30 currently running at DDR5-5600, a 2TB KingSpec XF PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, a 750W Cooler Master PSU, and Windows 11. The onboard adapter is a MediaTek RZ616 Wi-Fi 6E 160MHz. It was using driver 3.3.0.467 from February 2022, while the graphics driver was Intel Arc 32.0.101.8991. Could an outdated Wi-Fi driver, BIOS issue, or hardware problem explain why network activity triggers the crashes?
1 Answer
The Wi-Fi driver is the first thing I would update. The installed version is several years old, and the motherboard manufacturer has a newer MediaTek driver available. Install that directly from the board’s support page, reboot, and test again. Updating the motherboard BIOS would also be worthwhile, since newer firmware can improve memory compatibility, PCIe behavior, and onboard-device stability.
I installed the newer Wi-Fi driver, but I’m still getting KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED crashes.