Question Launching a performance-intensive game causes system-wide hang up ?

[Stabbykinz]

So this one is a head scratcher. It started very recently, in the last few days or so. I had swapped out (at long last) a faulty controller box for my fans to get the pretty lights sync'd up, and installed iCUE to get the lights on my memory going. Yaaay all of my pretty lights are good. Updated the firmware on my memory. Updated graphics card driver. Things are bing-chilling. At least, until I am literally incapable of playing games on my gaming rig. It's not entirely consistent on how it happens, or when, but the general gist is that if I launch a performance-intensive game (so far Elden Ring, Exanima, modded Fallout NV), eventually the game will crash or if it doesn't crash, after I exit all programs and UI elements will begin to freeze up. Sometimes this happens after rebooting without me even launching a game at all, thus the inconsistency. Now admittedly, before this, and this is not my proudest moment, but I did install Signal RGB before hand, and have since wiped it from the system with Revo Uninstaller...minus the driver.sys file I can't seem to get rid of. Still the issue persists. If anyone can give me a clue as to what might be happening or what I messed up, that'd be greatly appreciated.

I'll keep troubleshooting in the meantime, but here's what I've done so far.

Steps taken so far:

• Rolled back GPU driver to previous version.
• Contacted Corsair for previous firmware version.
• Doublechecked latest versions for chipset
• Revo-Uninstalled Signal RGB
• Closed Razer Cortex and untoggled start-up on boot
• SFC, DISM, MemDiag, only SFC initially showed issues but supposed fixed them.
• Benchmarked GPU with Heaven Engine, which had no issues afterwards unlike testing with an actual game.

Things to note:

The way the hang-ups happens is...weird. Because it's not just a freeze, or an all at once "can't move my cursor" type deal. Like, I can click the search bar, it's window will pop up, but it won't populate. I can't open new iterations of Windows Explorer. Task manager can be accessed but can't end programs and will eventually freeze, usually isn't able to update performance graphs but will initially populate with the start of the graphs. Discord and Steam can have their UI's interacted with until they freeze. The most consistent thing I notice is that when I click restart or shutdown from Start, nothing happens. Or it does get to the loading circle, it won't actually get around to restarting or shutting down, just stuck there. It's like...things gradually freeze across Windows maybe there's a pattern to it, but I can't really tell beyond the basic details I've noticed.

Specs:

Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. TUF GAMING X570-PRO WIFI II (AM4) 27 °C
CPU:AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12 core processor
GPU: 4095MB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (ASUStek Computer Inc) 35 °C
RAM: 4x Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 16 GB @ 3600 mhz
Monitor: ASUS VG34V (3440x1440@165Hz)
Storage
1863GB Seagate ST2000DX001-1CM164 (SATA ) 31 °C
931GB Crucial CT1000MX500SSD1 (SATA (SSD))
931GB Seagate FireCuda SE SSD ZP1000GM30033 (Unknown (SSD))
1863GB Seagate FireCuda 530 ZP2000GM30013 (Unknown (SSD))
Optical Drives: None
Audio: Realtek High Definition
Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Despite your comprehensive specs list, you still managed to leave out any PSU details (make, model & approximate age).

Please rectify.

 

[Stabbykinz]

Nuts, thought that list looked a bit short.

PSU is an EVGA G5 650 GOLD, I don't fully recall the age but I think I got it within last year.

Update though! While I was doing more testing, in particular with having Razer Cortex turned off, I tested the games that it would boost and then de-boost from...and no issues! So far, anyways. For some ungodly reason, it seems that Cortex's boosting started to have a negative affect on system performance. Tested multiple times afterwards, and while I'm still wary, it seems that the system no longer exhibits any cascading hang ups. Why this started up in the last few days when I haven't updated it myself in a long while, only the tech gods know. (Maybe it auto-updated...)

Sorry to take up forum space with something I managed to fix (supposedly) in short order after the post! I suppose this might help anyone that runs into a similar issue.