Is your computer crashing with a blue screen when you play heavy video games?
Is your computer crashing with a blue screen when you play heavy video games?
I have been having problems for about three months where playing video games makes my computer crash suddenly after 30 minutes or an hour and twenty minutes of use. When the game freezes, you still hear the music, some parts of your desktop work fine, but then a blue screen appears after another ten to fifteen seconds. This only happens when I play these specific games: Witcher 3, Oblivion Remastered, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Here is what my computer looks like:
The motherboard is an ASRock Z490 XTREME.
My CPU is an Intel i9-10900KF.
I use a graphics card called a GTX 3080 with 32GB of RAM from G.Skill running at 3600MHz.
The power supply is a 1000W Corsair Platinum unit (I don't remember the exact model).
I run Windows 11 on this setup.
My whole system has been working fine for about sixteen months. It's a custom build with three big fans blowing cool air on it. Before the crashes started, both my graphics card and CPU were overclocked to be faster than normal. Even though I pushed them hard, their temperatures never really went higher than 70 degrees on the GPU and 85 degrees on the CPU right before everything broke down.
I've tried a few things to fix this problem:
First, I turned off all the overclocking settings. This didn't help at all because my computer is still crashing. Just turning down the speed saved about 200 watts of power from my system.
I checked my memory with Memtest 64 for four hours without finding any errors.
I tried using a program called Bluescreen view to look at the crash file, but it didn't show me anything useful like missing files or bad drivers.
I ran a stress test on my CPU named Prime95 for three hours and I had no problems.
I also ran a stress test on my graphics card named Furmark for over four hours and that was fine too.
I reset Windows and completely removed the old graphics driver software, then installed new ones. Even though I tested both my GPU and CPU at the same time without any crashes showing up, things still didn't work properly. Since I have a custom water cooling loop, it's hard to take apart just one part to test if that specific piece is causing the problem.
I really want to know what might be wrong before spending money on new parts or gear. Any advice would be super helpful!
If those test files haven't appeared yet, maybe the hard drive storage isn't working right or it doesn't like running memtest86, furmark, and prime 95 without problems. My advice is to wipe out any dirt on the contacts using alcohol and then put that hard drive holding Windows back into place again.