Question CLOCK WATCHDOG TIMEOUT while playing games

[maybe134]

(cross-posting from the Systems forum because I just realized now that this forum was more appropriate)

Hey there!

I got a new MSI prebuilt a month ago. It did run into a couple of BSODs but those went away after I did a clean update of the graphics driver using DDU.

Recently I've been getting the BSODs again from time to time, always the same one, CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT. Temperatures were fine while gaming, so I don't think it's an overheating issue.

If it means anything, I noticed the CPU was using a boost clock speed of 4600 MHz. Also, when the system crashes, the pixels on the screen would sometimes freeze and produce something like this https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_w-p1CuxDRK_Nw9ijho0f3YUksUdi26P/view?usp=sharing. Sometimes it would show the usual BSOD screen. This makes me think perhaps it's a GPU issue as well?

Here are the dump files https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z4d_g2AlQbEQsCIok44BJM48NwP4RpVC/view?usp=sharing

Here are my specs:

• CPU: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11700KF @ 3.60GHz (16 CPUs), ~3.6GHz
• Mobo: Z590 PRO WIFI [CEC]
• GPU: GeForce RTX 3080
• 16 GB of RAM

Any troubleshooting tips are appreciated, thank you in advance!!

 

[Flippercomet500]

I have a problem just like yours except mine crashes even when I’m not playing games 😥if you go to bios, disable c-states, and turn on xmp1, go to your manual ram clock speeds and set them down about 100-300 mhz less than their maximum speed. If the problem goes away, don’t think you fixed it. I did this and a week later I assumed the problem was gone and the next day the blue screen was back

 

[Flippercomet500]

You can also try disabling intel turbo boost and asus turbo in the bios, I’ve heard some people say that it worked for them

 

[maybe134]

Thanks for the reply! I went ahead of updated the chipset driver to the latest version as per some of the other threads, which seemed to be doing ok for my last gaming session.

I agree that it's pretty frustrating how this BSOD comes and goes infrequently. I had a whole month without issues until it crept up again. If the chipset driver doesn't solve it, I'll go for your other suggestions.