New build locking up. Games crashing.

Snibbit · September 10, 2020

Specs

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600

GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Dragon

RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) 3200MHz

SSD: Crucial MX500 250GB

HDD: Seagate BarraCuda 2TB

Mobo: B450 Tomahawk Max

PSU: Corsair TXM Gold 550W

Heat Sink: CRYORIG H7

Fans: 2x intake: BeQuiet! 120MM Pure Wings 2, 2x exhaust: Noctua NF-P12 redux

Case: NZXT H510 (I was planning on changing to a case with better airflow, soon)

OS: Windows 10 Home

I built this computer back in around June/July and all parts were bought then, excluding the HDD, which was bought at the very end of last year. I've built a number of computers, so I'm confident that it was all put together properly.

A brief explanation of the issue

- After playing a game in co-op for 20 hours in the past 2 weeks (Divinity: Original Sin 2), with no issues, the game suddenly locked up for a few seconds before crashing, and did so another 3 or 4 times in the space of 10 minutes.

- Later in the game, there were some white flickering lines appearing in-game, and a game restart didn't fix them.

- Thinking my graphics card may be faulty, I went to type in partpicker into my address bar, my computer locked up for a few seconds as I was typing, black screened for about a second, and then came back, with the rest of the typing filling in.

- After a restart, I loaded up the same game and the graphical issue was gone, but didn't play enough to see if it'd crash.

- I played a different game to see if it had any issues (Forza Horizon 3), and played comfortably for an hour until it also locked up and crashed to desktop.

- I have ran BurnInTest twice, checking RAM, 2D Graphics, 3D Graphics, CPU, SSD, HDD, sound and network, twice, and the test has come back with no errors both times.

Further details

- When my computer was first built, I felt like it was a fair bit louder than I was expecting, so I spent a while tweaking things to try and solve that. I ruled out the graphics card being the issue as the temperatures were fine and the fans were idle, so clearly weren't making the noise. My assumption was the stock case fans that came with the case or the heat sink on the CPU.

- Since I first built the computer, it has done a mini-freeze during general browser use (I use Firefox) two or three times before this new issue.

- One of the stock case fans died on me already, resulting in me replacing it and the other stock fan with the Noctua case fans.

- I had been playing games just fine before this issue arose yesterday, including the games I mentioned before (Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Forza Horizon 3). They never had any issues and no crashing. Yesterday, I played a few hours of Divinity in the morning and it was fine, I stopped to do a bit of work, and then jumped back on to play some more and it was that session where the crashing began. Nothing had changed on my computer in that time.

- I've had HWMonitor running and not noticed anything abnormal. After my games crashed, I checked the Radeon Software and saw that the GPU was at around 60c, so it doesn't seem to be running too hot.

- I've checked for GPU driver udpates and run a full virus scan.

- I've not done any overclocking.

If you need more information, ask away. I feel like I'm forgetting something.

This whole build has been a nightmare for me, right from ordering the parts, so if anyone can help me finally be content with this build, I'd be very much appreciative.

Thanks for any help.

Snibbit · September 10, 2020

-Update-

I tried Divinity again and the graphical errors were back. The game ended up freezing again, but this time I had to force close it. Sound through Discord was still playing just fine. After a brief moment, both of my screens went black and wouldn't come back on until I did a forced shutdown and booted the computer back up.

I saw a critical Kernel-Power entry in the Event Viewer after a reboot, but I guess that's because of the forced shutdown. I also noticed that I've had that same error 8 times since June, which may or may not have been from force reboots; I couldn't say for sure.