Question How did my gpu just stop working?

[rawjr11]

The other day I updated to Windows 11 and applied new thermal paste in hopes to save my pc. After the fresh restart, everything was smooth as could be. New drivers, nvidia Control panel was installed. Initially, I had fluent, flawless games until I changed SOMETHING and now my gpu is either being used at 1% or looks like the silloutte to the grand canyon and I cannot figure out why. I was able to reach over 400 fps when it was running well but now I can barely get over 75. so before I get asked the basic questions like, "Are your drivers, windows, and bios updated? Do you have a bottleneck, overclocked?" Everything is updated and I am not OC. Have afterburner and hwmonitor and those are also as they should be. Anything helps at this point becuase I am STUCK.
1660ti ve
16gb ram
ryzen 5 2600x
there may be a slight bottleneck but nothing harsh enough to make my gpu do what its doing in all my games..

 

[Tac 25]

The other day I updated to Windows 11 and applied new thermal paste in hopes to save my pc.

why are you trying to "save" your pc? Was there a severe problem before you applied new thermal paste?

I had fluent, flawless games until I changed SOMETHING and now my gpu is either being used at 1% or looks like the silloutte to the grand canyon

what did you change?

 

[rawjr11]

why are you trying to "save" your pc? Was there a severe problem before you applied new thermal paste?



what did you change?

No problem really, just a major loss of performance. While updating to Windows 11 i also learned my bios settings for game mode and xmp were turned off so I enabled them. The rig was running flawlessly for several hours after I made that change (not sure what I did or if I even did anything) . GPU was being used at 99-100% and now its just like the computer doesn't want to use the gpu. I have settings configured and high enough that it should undoubtedly be using the graphics card.