PC Crashing When Launching Certain Games?

Silly Ducklings · May 3, 2021

My PC crashes completely, sudden black screen and full reboot, when starting games sometimes. It has happened with Hunt: Showdown, Warzone, Apex Legends, and Enlisted so far, but I feel like these games don't have anything specific to do with it. Sometimes it will also only crash a couple minutes after launch, but most of the time the crash is immediately when the game is started (before the game even pops onto the screen). Sometimes, the games will stop crashing my PC, and I will be able to play them normally for a while, but this doesn't seem to last. For example, Warzone crashed my PC on launch a ton a few months ago, then for the next couple months it did not, but now it is crashing again. The event viewer critical error is Kernel-Power, ID 41. AFAIK this is just standard "something bad happened", so idk if that's of any use.

I have an old PC with two 980s in it, and I tried swapping my GPU with one of those, but the crashes still happened, so its not the GPU.

I can use a different PSU to test if the PSU is what's causing the problem by taking the 1000w PSU from my old PC, but I would have to rip out most of the cable management from my old PC (because corsair and EVGA cables are not compatible) and doing this and putting everything back together afterword would take at least 3 hours and would be a massive pain, so I'd like to get some pointers for like diagnostic tools or something (?) before doing that.

Anyone have any advice for how I should try to fix this?

Specs:

CPU: Ryzen 5950x (not overclocked)

GPU: Asus 3090 TUF (not overclocked nor factory overclocked)

PSU: Corsair SF750

RAM: 2x Corsair LPX 32gb 3600mhz CL18

MB: Asus X570-I

This is a mini-ITX build in a CM NR200. As far as I can see, nothing is rubbing up against anything important though, so I don't think poor cable management has anything to do with the problem.

Edit: Also, this has been happening off and on depending on what games I'm playing at the time (it has never crashed with Valorant, which is what I mostly play) since I first built this thing about 5 months ago. I have gone through numerous updated GPU drivers and have updated my CPU drivers once, and neither of these two things stopped the crashing.