I've been experiencing an infuriating issue where my PC just shuts down completely while I'm playing various games. There are no crash logs or blue screens—just a sudden black screen on both monitors. I've checked with Radeon and Ryzen Master and found no abnormalities before the shutdowns; everything seems normal according to the metrics.
After the shutdown, I can't restart the PC right away and often have to manually power cycle it, sometimes needing to turn off the PSU completely before it will boot up again. Initially, I thought it was a RAM issue, so I replaced the RAM, but the problem persists. The only other theory I have is that there might be a power draw issue, but considering my PSU is less than a year old and should be sufficient for my specs, I'm not sure.
I'm at my wit's end trying to troubleshoot this and would greatly appreciate any guidance. I've included links to PCPartPicker for my build specs and a collection of minidump files that might help, though they don't generate every time I crash. This issue has been ongoing for about three months and seems to defy logic!
3 Answers
Sounds like a frustrating issue! I went through something similar when I built my new PC. For me, it turned out to be the XMP setting in the BIOS; I disabled it and everything started working fine afterward. Have you tried playing around with that setting?
It's odd that there aren’t any logs of the shutdowns. Does this only happen under heavy graphics loads? Just because your PSU is new doesn’t mean it can’t fail, so that could be worth investigating.
It happens inconsistently, even during lighter games that shouldn’t push my hardware to the limit. I did an OCCT stability test, and it didn’t crash even under max load for half an hour, which is confusing!
You might want to check your motherboard for potential short-circuits. Sometimes that can cause weird shutdown issues, even if everything seems fine otherwise. Just a thought!
How would I even test for that? I guess I could switch out the motherboard, but that sounds like a hassle!
I thought it might be the culprit too, but I've already tested my system both with XMP on and off, and it didn't change the frequency of these shutdowns at all. Just installed new RAM a couple of weeks ago, and the issue still continues.