whea 18 Crash, reboot and WHEA 18 Cache Hierarchy Error after loading up The Sims 4.

[emothxughts]

(System specs in the PCPartsPicker link in my signature, but replace the GPU with a RX550 2GB card)

 

Previously, when I crashed, rebooted and WHEA 18'd in games, I was running a Gigabyte RX5600XT card and I narrowed the problem down to the card, as detailed in a previous thread of mine. So I sent the card out for repair and put in the card I'm currently running now, a Sapphire Pulse RX550 2GB card. It has been running flawlessly in games like Genshin Impact, Skyrim, Destiny 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance so far, if somewhat slower than the other card obviously. Until today.

 

Today, I decided to load up The Sims 4, a game I have not played in a month. Since the last time I played, there was an update to the game, so I updated the game and the mods I've installed for the game. First sign that something was wrong was when I loaded up a save game and my Sim is gone. I exited the game and updated one more mod that I previously didn't. Then the really bad thing happened, I launched the game again, then bam, blackscreen and then restart, followed by a WHEA 18 Cache Hierarchy error in the Event Viewer afterwards. After processing in my mind what the hell just happened, I repaired The Sims 4 through the EA app, loaded up the game again, and this time around it did not crash, and I was able to load into the save game where my Sim was previously gone, and lo and behold my Sim is there. I played for a while, then exited the game and played Destiny 2 afterwards to make sure this problem doesn't occur again. It didn't. But hardly reassuring, given how intermittent my previous WHEA 18 errors were. So I want to ask, can a corrupt game outright cause a WHEA 18 error? Or was that just a coincidence and one of my hardware is in fact failing?

 

Things I have done previously:

• Updated graphics drivers to the latest, 23.3.2.
• Overclocked the poor RX550, core to 1300Mhz from default 1206Mhz, memory to 1600Mhz from default 1500Mhz, power limit +50%, could this be the reason?
• BIOS is up to date, version 4.60.
• So is the chipset driver.
• Loaded up Stable Diffusion in CPU only mode to see if my CPU is failing. Nope, just high-ish temps of around 75C but no crash.
• Tested memory with memtest86+ and Testmem5, no errors, not even with XMP on.

[emothxughts]

Bump since nobody but me is replying to this after 3 hours. Some more details:

• My RX550 doesn't go above 66C with the overclock mentioned above. But that's just the GPU temps, the card doesn't have sensors to measure VRAM temps.
• CrystalDiskInfo shows that my NVME C: drive is at 98% health.
• My wifi card the TP-Link WN881ND does crash my PC sometimes, with either a Driver IRQL or System Thread Exception BSOD. I use the drivers from the TP-Link website, but that isn't the latest dated one.
• sfc /scannow says "Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations."

I really hope this is just a hiccup due to the Sims 4 game and not a sign of imminent GPU failure...(the card was bought brand new in August 2021)