Seeking a second view on your struggling 2-year-old PC with Ryzen 5 4500 and Powercolor RX 6600.
Seeking a second view on your struggling 2-year-old PC with Ryzen 5 4500 and Powercolor RX 6600.
Hi, after several years of playing games—roughly 4 to 5 days a week with my custom setup—it seems it’s giving up now. It doesn’t just randomly freeze and shut down; there’s a clear pattern. About three weeks ago, after just five minutes of gaming, the PC would power off and the GPU wouldn’t display any errors. When it restarted, the system would boot back up without issues. Neither Windows nor troubleshooting tools showed any problems, so I ruled out a software problem. Still, I tried cleaning caches, reinstalling drivers, scrubbing drives, checking for errors, reinstalling the OS, disabling trackers via Winaero and Chris Titus’ winutil. After these steps, gaming time jumped from five minutes to about twenty minutes, but it would still shut down. I started suspecting a hardware issue, so I reset everything—CPU, GPU, RAM, M.2, SATA drives, all power cables, even the CMOS battery was left off long enough to force a BIOS update. Still, it kept failing when gaming. I also tried a deep clean of software diagnostics, focusing on my SSD with Crystal and running stress tests on CPU and GPU. Stressing just one component didn’t cause shutdowns; only when both were pushed hard did it happen. It was similar to what I experience during normal tasks like typing, browsing, or watching videos for hours. After reviewing more gameplay footage, I decided to lower the GPU’s clock speed. The issue mostly disappeared after a few hours of playing AOE 3, even though I kept underclocking. After weeks of testing, I believe the main culprit is my PSU—probably needing a bigger capacity unit. Current specs: CPU—AMD Ryzen 5 4500; GPU—AMD Powercolor Radeon RX 6600; RAM—XPG DDR4 2-8GB; Motherboard—ASUS PRIME B450M-A II AM4 DRR4 Micro ATX; PSU—Aercool 500W Cylon 80 Bronze Plus. Thanks for your time and attention.
HikariMisako
04-16-2024, 10:47 AM #2Do you have any questions about clocks and temperatures? Maybe the trash PSU is worth considering.
PaigeOfTheBook
04-16-2024, 10:47 AM #7Hello, thanks for your feedback! Are these bad boys sufficient for my basic requirements? I mostly enjoy AAA titles from 2016 and earlier, like Cyberpunk 2077.
Der_Winter
04-16-2024, 10:47 AM #8They’ll still suffice even after upgrading to a 13900k and a 7800 XT, ensuring they’re definitely sufficient
BPGUENTZEL
04-16-2024, 10:47 AM #9It seems my intentions weren't entirely clear. What I meant is that this might not be enough for my current setup. I don't think upgrading the CPU or GPU is necessary; maybe just adding another SSD would suffice.