Question Freezing followed by crashes

[Nikola1123]

GPU: msi rx 480 8gb
CPU: ryzen 5 2600
Motherboard: msi b350
RAM: hyper x fury 8GB 3000MHz
PSU: MWE bronze 650
Case: Corsair Carbide series 200 R
Operating System & Version: Win 10 pro Version: 2004
GPU Drivers: 20.12.01
Chipset Drivers: up to date
Background Applications: Opera GX, Steam, Discord

Description of Original Problem: Whenever I play pretty much any game the PC freezes for about 5-10 secs. After that the game either crashes or is in a weird state where i can't alt + tab back, so i just hear it in the background. Happens on almost every game. I mostly get error messages telling me there was a GPU hardware failure or the AMD bug report says a driver timeout has occurred. Problem is mostly mitigated by turning all of the graphics options to the lowest possible settings.

Troubleshooting attemps: clean installed the GPU drivers, ran the games with no background programs, removed any overclocking, monitored internal temps and everything seemed fine, instantly crashed while stress testing the GPU. CPU had no issues when tested the same way.

 

[Ralston18]

In my mind the main suspect would be the PSU.

How old is that PSU? Heavy gaming use may have led to an early (and designed in) EOL. [End of Life]

Look in Reliability History and Event Viewer for error codes, warnings, and even informational events.

Many and varying errors etc.. are a good indication of a failing PSU.