[SOLVED] PC freezing "slowly" until unresponsive when gaming

[Lloyyd]

Hey all, this thing is driving me nuts and I don't know what to do anymore.

It's very hard to reproduce, which makes it very hard to test. I thought i finally got rid of it, but now after 1 month it came back yesterday.

Basically whenever I play games, in my opinion, more demanding games as well, everything except the game, starts freezing.
It usually starts with chrome or file explorer on my 2nd monitor, I can still talk in discord and play the game. I can't close any windows anymore.
And then after a minute or two, discord stops and then maybe after 3-4 minutes the game also freezes. Right at the start of the freeze, I can't alt-tab or start the task manager anymore.

My system
Ryzen 3950x
ASUS Strix X570-E
Corsair 4xGB DDR4 3200
samsung 970 pro 512
samsung 970 evo plus 1tb
samsung 860 evo
before zotac 2080 ti (thought that this was the reason)
currently 1080 ti
be quiet straight power 11 850w

What I've done so far:

I have 4 ram sticks, which I tested in order that I can say it crashed on all of them, single or dual. Also did several ramtests.
Reinstalled windows, upgraded to windows 11.
Tested all my ssds, but didn't swap yet. Used chkdsk several times
I tested another GPU now for 1 month.
My temps are fine as well, nothing is spiking or anything.
For some reasn, on my other GPU, it crashes almost within 1 hour. On this new gpu it took it 1 month, and yesterday it crashed twice.

I played now for almost 2 hours and haven't gotten a single crash.

I tried to look through windows event logs, but I can't find anything there.

My questions if someone can help me:
Maybe anyone knows a method to properly track the crashing?
From my point of view, it could be either PSU or Mainboard/CPU, how do I test that without swapping?
I don't have anything to swap, i would have to buy and refund which makes this not so nice.

 

[rgd1101]

how full are the ssd?

 

[Lloyyd]

My windows nvme ssd has 300 free of 375gb
ssd Data 800 free of 930
nvme Games 350 free of 930

 

[geofelt]

How much ram total?

Sounds like a memory leak somewhere.

Try running without discord or chrome tabs open.

 

[Lloyyd]

4x8GB

Can't be ram. It crashed when I used only two of them, and again when I used the other two. Then I swapped one of them each and it crashed again. That would mean that there had to be 3 of the 4 to be faulty.

I'm pretty sure I also tested only using one of them, but I have this error now for over 1 year and I can't remember fully 😅

Also I rarely use discord actually.
It happened a lot when I played wow and watched a series next to it.

I was able to reproduce it quite fast when I had two games running, or a very demanding game.

It also happened in the past with only the game running and nothing else...

 

[Lloyyd]

I found the solution.

It was the PSU.

After hearing a little sound coming out of my PSU last week, I checked it up. The fan was not spinning. Since its pointing down of my pc, I never really saw it.

So I got a new PSU and stresstested the 2080 ti now a LOT.

The funny thing is:
Its much much quieter. Before the fans would go ham around 70% usage already and it would be way too loud to comfort.
Not I did stresstest it with 3 games at 87%, normally it would crash within 1 minute. It ran now fine for over 20 mins and the fans are not hearable at all.

This was such a weird error to find. Never had this happen before.