Home-built and pre-built PCs both reboot during demanding games (home electrical issue?)

taylskid · October 23, 2021

I have a home-built PC with the following specs:

MSI B450 GAMING PRO CARBON AC
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
XFX RX 5700 Xt Thicc III Ultra 8GB
Corsair CMK32GX4M2B3000C15 LPX 32GB (16x2)
EVGA 220-G5-0850-X1 Super Nova 850 G5, 80 Plus Gold 850W
WD_BLACK 1TB SN750 nvme
Samsung 1 TB sata ssd (can't find the exact model at this point)

It performs nearly flawlessly for my usecases, however it reboots seemingly completely randomly while I'm playing demanding games, particularly X-Plane (although it has crashed in other high-intensity games like Microsoft Flight Sim and Red Dead Redemption 2).

I have never once seen a blue screen of death, and the only error message I've seen in the event viewer that seems relevant is a Kernel-Power event 41. All of my temperatures according to Hwinfo64 are completely acceptable, peaking at ~80C but averaging low 70s over the course of an X-Plane flight. Memtest86 ran for almost 24 hours and returned nothing. My BIOS and all my drivers (that I could find) are up-to-date.

I was absolutely ripping my hair out trying to debug this over the course of months and yesterday finally blew a gasket and walked to my local Microcenter and picked up a pre-built POWERSPEC G901, with the following specs:

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB
32GB DDR4-3200 RAM (16x2)
2TB Solid State Drive (nvme)
750w PSU.

Got the PC home and set up, immediately installed X-Plane and lo-and-behold same exact reboot, same exact situation: a Kernel-Power event 41 error, all of my temperatures are completely fine, etc. The PC was an openbox special, but it seems stable otherwise and only reboots during high-demand games, same as my old PC. Seems like too much of a coincidence, right?

Now, I'm pretty sure it might be related to my apartment electrical wiring. I live in a turn-of-the-century Brownstone in Brooklyn NYC so who knows what the status of our wiring is. I tried a few different outlets around my apartment that I know are on different breakers just to ensure it wasn't isolated to an outlet or something, same results each time. Nothing else in my apartment is flickering and no breakers are actually being tripped.

I ran to Staples and bought an APC UPS (BX1000M-L60, 1000VA/600 Watts) hoping that would be enough to help smooth out the power. I let the UPS charge overnight and attempted to boot X-Plane again this morning on the new pre-built desktop. I can make it noticeably further into the simulation, but it still crashes. On these attempts to to run X-Plane, the computer gets incredibly laggy (mouse is lagging and the audio starts to get extremely messed up) shortly before it reboots. I've only tried one other game on this new desktop (Planet Zoo) which crashes the machine pretty rapidly too. This is a game I could run on my old machine without any issues. I was carefully watching the watt load the entire time on the UPS and it never exceeded 50%.

I'm pretty sure this issue is related to my home electrical system. Do I just need an even bigger UPS here? Am I screwed? I am going to try and lug (one of) my desktop to a friend's apartment at some point to try and see if everything works somewhere else.

Thanks for the help, this has been taunting me for months now.