Question PC freezes completely when installing a game on drive with Windows Installed on it ?

[AlphaStrain]

Gooooooood morning everyone, I'm hoping someone out there that's more knowledgeable than I can help me with an issue I've never encountered before. So, here's a little backstory, my old PC was running a GTX 1070, i7 7700, 250GB SSD, 4TB HDD 16GB of RAM. Everything was fine, it was time for an upgrade. All I could afford was the meat of the PC. Upgraded to an RTX 2070 Super, Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, Asus TUF Gaming B570X Plus MOBO and 2x16GB 3200mhz ram. I kept the HDD and the SSD. The SSD had Windows installed on it, the ONLY game I had on it was Path of Exile. It wasn't until Hogwarts Legacy came out that I attempted to install it on it. Herein lies the first problem... as I was installing Hogwarts Legacy it COMPLETELY froze up my entire PC several times while installing to the point where I just turned my monitor off and went and watched TV.

Skip ahead a few months and the freezing issue started to become more frequent, and not from installing things on it, just with general use and playing games installed on my HDD. Freezing issues included freezing inside a game after tabbing out and tabbing back in for roughly 30 seconds each time. Freezing when I shut a game down etc. I figured my SSD was dying. So, I swapped it out for an NVMe, wiped the SSD and the HDD with a fresh Windows install on the NVMe. A Kingston SNV2S500G 500GB NVMe, I installed Path of Exile on it, GTA 5 and FiveM. Everything seemed fine.

Cut to about 2 months later (About a month a half ago) the same tab out and tab in freeze issues on games not installed on the NVMe started happening. I just ignored it... cut to last week, installing Starfield on my NVMe froze my PC several times over. Cut to today, just loading up windows and ONLY having Discord and Task Manager open, my PC was freezing and my NVMe was capping out at 100% for some reason. I uninstalled Starfield, I uninstalled FiveM and GTA5 and now it's working perfectly fine... ish. Small stutters here and there. Get this though, I reinstalled Hogwarts Legacy on my old SSD (Yes, I kept it lol) and it didn't freeze once. Smooth install.

I ordered a Samsung Evo 970 since it was $70 CAD and intend to clone my Kingston NVMe and replace it with the Samsung.

Question 1: Would there be any cause for concern that this issue will happen again given the circumstance of one drive being connected via SATA Cable and the other being plugged into the MOBO directly presenting the SAME issue?

Question 2: What could be the likely cause of the issue? Could it be my MOBO?

Asus ROG Strix RTX 2070 Super
Asus TUF Gaming B570x PLUS MOBO
Kingston 500GB NVMe
Sandisk SSD
Seagate 4TB HDD
2x16GB Corsair 3200mhz RAM
Ryzen 9 3900x 12-core/24 thread CPU
2 month old 750 Watt PSU (Forgot the name, think it's a Corsair)

 

[Lutfij]

2 month old 750 Watt PSU (Forgot the name, think it's a Corsair)
You might want to confirm the make and model of the PSU. Corsair being the brand of the unit, if that is right on your end...while 750W is the advertised wattage of the unit.

Upgraded to an RTX 2070 Super, Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, Asus TUF Gaming B570X Plus MOBO and 2x16GB 3200mhz ram. I kept the HDD and the SSD. The SSD had Windows installed on it,
Did you reinstall the OS after the platform migration?

You forgot to mention the make and model of the case. Number of fans in your case and the orientation of said fans in your build? How are you cooling the processor?

 

[AlphaStrain]

You might want to confirm the make and model of the PSU. Corsair being the brand of the unit, if that is right on your end...while 750W is the advertised wattage of the unit.

It is a Corsair 750W PSU. As for the model? I don't know. I didn't put it in. I took it to a PC shop because I didn't feel like doing it myself.

Did you reinstall the OS after the platform migration?

I did not. I saw no reason to reinstall Windows. I clean uninstalled my old GPU drivers and reinstalled RTX drivers. I never installed any other drivers on my old setup be it bios or chipset drivers. I clean installed Windows when I put the NVMe in though. Thus making a clean install after previous build changes not being the issue as the issue persists.

You forgot to mention the make and model of the case. Number of fans in your case and the orientation of said fans in your build? How are you cooling the processor?

Case is a Thermaltake Commander White Edition. Two fans, an intake in the front and exhaust in the back with the default CPU fan the processor came with. Though I'm not directly seeing why that is important, given what I know. Apologies if that sounds argumentative, it does to me, it's not meaning to be. I'm just not seeing the relativity of it. Perhaps I need some insight. Everything ran fine on my old 650W PSU for over a year until my PSU clunked out and had to replace it. At that time the PSU was over 6 years old. As are my SSD and my HDD and they run fine right now.