PC freezes unexpectedly during specific games, particularly when using Chrome.
PC freezes unexpectedly during specific games, particularly when using Chrome.
As the title says, I've been having this issue that only seems to occur with certain games but when it does I'm forced to completely power down the PC and start it back up. It's happened with Last Epoch, Tiny Tina's Wonderland (couldn't even play these for 10 minutes), and Lost Ark to name a few. Though oddly enough with LA it never occurred even once during the whole leveling process and only started days later when doing high level dungeons or returning to busy cities. I have even turned down a lot of the settings like shadows and various effects (despite the optimized settings being "ultra" everything), but it hasn't made a difference in the freezing.
I got this PC at the end of 2020 and it's served me well other than this fairly recent issue. This is my user benchmark:
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/51949749
(I'm not sure what issue the user benchmark is citing with my SSD. I'm not able to find anything wrong with it and it gives me no issues in general. Additionally, 2 of the 3 games I mentioned are not installed on it.)
I've tried making sure all my drivers were up to date for basically everything and ran sfc /scannow, not to mention I just recently did an upgrade to Windows 11 as well. I've basically been trying small adjustments here and there, including turning off hardware acceleration on Chrome, based on other threads I've read. Freezing can still happen even if Chrome isn't running, but it seems to occur more if it is. I do not typically get any sort of freezing if I'm just using the PC for browsing, documents, music, etc. It
might
have occurred once before with various applications at work, but I can't accurately remember.
I have looked through other threads people have posted reporting similar problems but I didn't see any solution that has worked for me so far and wanted to post my benchmark and see if anyone has insight for me. While I don't have the greatest PC ever, it's usually more than enough to run modern games and I don't even play the most intensive kinds. I just want to be able to play stuff I spent money on and not get corrupted files. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You can remove the PC cover and see if the fans start spinning when you turn it on. For changing fan speed, MSI Afterburner should be used. I found a helpful page that doesn't require watching a full video.
Also, could you confirm if you're overclocking?
{GoofyOne's 2c worth}
Often when the machine freezes or restarts during gameplay, a power supply problem might be the cause. However, it's hard to be certain. As the machine warms up while working harder with games, it consumes more electricity.
Do you remember all the parts in your PC? CPU, motherboard, graphics card, and power supply? Well, you have an Asrock Z390 Phantom Gaming 4S/ac board, an Intel Core i7-9700K processor, and a Nvidia RTX 2070S graphics card. The benchmark screen doesn’t specify the power supply model.
I believe the recommended power supply for that GPU is 450 Watts, but most users add an extra 100-150 Watts, suggesting a minimum of 550-600 Watts. Another chance is that the GPU overheats during games—make sure the fans are functioning correctly.
On my RX 580X graphics card, there’s only one fan, so I need to create a custom fan profile in the AMD driver to keep it cool. It fails if left on default settings.
{GoofyOne's 2c worth... which might or might not actually be worth 2c}
You can remove the PC cover and see if the fans start spinning when you turn it on. For changing fan speed, MSI Afterburner should be used. I found a helpful page that provides this information without requiring a full video. Thankfully, it doesn't involve watching a long clip.