Question Graphics card/driver crashes randomly while playing games

[FireITH]

So I bought a refurbished gaming laptop a few months ago and I feel like I've tried everything to resolve an issue it's had ever since I bought it. While I'm gaming on it, my external monitor will lose signal, the audio will cut out, and the laptop screen will flash. Eventually windows makes the disconnect sound (doo doo doo), and my integrated graphics take over. When I look at device manager it says that my graphics card is disconnected from the PCI slot and needs to be reconnected. The only way to fix this is to power cycle my laptop, and then my graphics card reconnects. The thing that confuses me the most is the apparent randomness of the crash. I've played Borderlands 3 for several days in a row with no crashes, using 95% of my GPU, then Valorant will crash after 10 minutes on lowest graphics settings. The only time it ever crashed while playing Borderlands was when I was in a menu (arguably the least graphically demanding part of a game). Sometimes the crash will resolve itself (by switching to integrated graphics), other times it will BSOD and restart. Sometimes I get a popup window saying that "Your graphics driver has crashed!" I thought I had managed to mitigate the issue by capping my fps and lowering my graphics settings in all my games, but it still continued to crash, albeit less commonly.

Things I've Tried:

• Updating graphics drivers
• Testing Ram (Windows Memory Diagnostic and MemTest, 0 errors)
• GPU stress test (97% GPU usage for several minutes, no problems)
• Changing Nvidia Control Panel settings (vsync off, power setting: prefer maximum performance)
• Monitoring temps (Stable 70 degrees C around time of crash)
• Reinstalling Windows

Games that have caused the crash:

• Valorant (seems to be the most common)
• Hitman
• Rocket League
• Borderlands 3
• LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
• Payday 2
• Fortnite (consistently every time I jumped out of the battle bus)

Since I have a laptop, I don't think I have any way of just replacing the GPU and no other parts, unless I'm wrong. I've also read that it could be my PSU, but I'm using the one that was made for the laptop, so I would assume it's fine? I just really don't want to have to buy a completely new laptop to replace one that was "certified refurbished" and yet faulty out of the box.

Specs:

• OMEN Laptop - 15-ek0013dx
• RTX 2060
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz
• 16 GB of RAM

Please let me know if I left out any important information that could be useful.

 

[Yang46204]

Computer Crashes When Playing Games FAQ
???? Why does my computer keep crashing when playing games?
The possible factors that cause ‘computer crashes when playing games’ include:

You are running too many programs in the background and they use lots of memory.
Your current graphics card drivers are incompatible with your Windows OS (especially Windows 10).
Your sound driver collides with other devices.
You have installed improper software recently.
Your computer is threated by some malware or virus.
Your hard drive had some issues, like bad sectors.
Your computer is overheating. Scentsy Workstation App

 

[FireITH]

I have tried all of these things, and it still crashes. When the laptop recovered using the iGPU I went to device manager and clicked "show hidden devices", and in the status of my 2060 it said something to the effect of "the card has been disconnected and needs to be reconnected." However, I know it can't have been disconnected physically because it's a laptop and it's soldered to the motherboard. It also reconnects when I restart my computer. Idk if that information is useful but just thought I'd throw it out there.