Fan and/or thermal issues and crashing on XPS 8940

[froogers]

I have a Dell XPS 8940 (i5-10400, RTX 2060, 16GB), and recently it’s been having some issues with the fans reviving up and then turning back off repeatedly while running demanding tasks. It’s been hard to tell,but I think it’s the GPU fans because of the nature of the tasks (VR, occasional crypto mining) and how it’s not happening during more processor-heavy tasks (Modded Minecraft), however I’ve experimented with Afterburner to absolutely no success. Whatever is happening is overriding Afterburner.

 

There is also, more notably, crashing, typically while playing Minecraft, where the PC’s visuals shut down and the fans crank up to max speed. All my RGB peripherals are frozen in the state they were when the PC was on. The only way to fix this is to pull the plug, so as you can imagine, it’s not the best for my data. When it was under warranty, I contacted Dell, and they remoted into my PC, took a look at the crash logs, and said “This is a software issue,” when the logs said the opposite (but were almost equally unhelpful), but it’s Dell, so I don’t know what I was expecting. Can anyone help me out?