PC recently restarted and now runs specific games smoothly.
PC recently restarted and now runs specific games smoothly.
My computer stopped working for two weeks, and I fixed it about two weeks ago. The issue initially appeared to be related to the motherboard or CPU, so I replaced those components with second-hand parts—this was a small upgrade compared to my previous setup. Everything functioned normally until last Wednesday. I was playing Fortnite while chatting in Discord when the PC suddenly shut down and restarted. There was no shutdown notification; it just turned off as if power was cut. Since then, it has rebounded on games like Overwatch, Ace Combat 7, and Fortnite. Overwatch restarts quickly after launching a match, usually when entering a game. Fortnite reboots in the menu during settings changes or when jumping from the battle bus. Ace Combat 7 takes about 1 to 30 minutes to recover. The Windows Event Viewer shows a "Kernel Power error 41," but many suggest this isn’t always a PSU problem. I’ve tried several fixes: uninstalled drivers via Device Manager, updated graphics cards through NVIDIA, reinstalled games, and even changed Overwatch’s refresh rate temporarily. A strange workaround was setting Overwatch to 60Hz, which briefly resolved the issue. After resetting Windows (which disabled some settings), I enabled hardware acceleration, high performance power plan, and XMP—then went to sleep. The next morning Fortnite worked without restarting. Later, Overwatch ran smoothly at 75Hz. The following day it worked fine in the morning. The next afternoon it rebooted during a Discord call, but after exiting the chat it restarted. In the evening I tried opening the PC while on a call and it rebooted again. Now I’m really frustrated and unsure what to do next. My system specs are: i5-6600K, 4GB RAM, MSI Z170A gaming graphics, GTX 1060, 3GB RAM, 450W PSU, 1TB SSD, HD 120GB. It handles games like Battlefield 1 at medium settings without issues, but seems to struggle with certain titles.