Question PC keeps freezing but plays the audio

[DarkDyllon]

I got an weird freeze i've honestly never seen before until it started.

it generally happens during gaming, or right after closing a game, the PC freezes, but audio plays, even if i'm in an Discord call i can hear what they're saying for a good 10-15 seconds before that gets cut off aswel, but music in general keeps playing.

tried an fresh instal of windows 10 when this started and it was fine for atleast 2 days before it started happening again, no idea what it can be, event viewer doesn't show me much except that the system unexpectely restarted (thanks, i know that)

running an AMD Ryzen 5 2600.
Nvidia RTX 2060 super
16 GB of RAM
AX370-gaming 5 motherboard.
Samsung 980 M.2 1TB SSD (also with windows 10 installed)

checking shortly after the freeze and reboot the temps seem normal, not too high atleast.
my motherboards temp generally don't break the 50C
CPU around 50C ish.
GPU around 47C
M.2 on 42C
SSDon 35C
and HDD on 32C

don't got an spare PSU (or know how to actually replace an PSU/Motherboard, no idea if there's an tool to check that or what i'll be looking for)
i can remove an RAM stick, but not sure if these freezes can even be related to that.

if anyone has an idea what might be failing or what is wrong would be greatly appreciated.
noticed that the freeze started happening around 2-3 hours after enabling the ultimate power plan, not sure if that can have any effect.
had the PC on for the entire night reinstalling games and it didn't freeze, was on the entire day afterwards aswel, shut off when i went to bed.
then when i played with a friend in the evening of the next day i re-enabled the ultimate plan and it happened 2-3 hours afterwards, for now reverted back to just high performance.

 

[RARRAF]

I would say PSU is on its way out no there is no way to test it more expensive than a new PSU get a new better PSU,

 

[DarkDyllon]

I would say PSU is on its way out no there is no way to test it more expensive than a new PSU get a new better PSU,

that´s what causing the weird freeze where the audio keeps playing?
never seen that kind of freeze, normally it just repeat the last sound on repeat very loud until i reset the system (generally)
if it's just the PSU then yeah it sucks but it is what it is (not that expensive atleast) but i kinda want to know what is the issue, or how to isolate it.

 

[johnbl]

that´s what causing the weird freeze where the audio keeps playing?
never seen that kind of freeze, normally it just repeat the last sound on repeat very loud until i reset the system (generally)
if it's just the PSU then yeah it sucks but it is what it is (not that expensive atleast) but i kinda want to know what is the issue, or how to isolate it.

go in and disable all sound drivers that do not have a speaker connected to them. (control panel device manager)
if you do not use the motherboard sound device, go into bios and disable the hardware. if you do use it then make sure the driver is updated .

There was a bug in a common motherboard sound driver where it would respond to other sound drivers requests and corrupt the stack of the second sound driver. it was fixed in 2020 version of the motherboard sound driver.
note: if you do have a older version of a realtek motherboard sound driver, update it to the current version and it has a good chance of fixing the issue without disabling the other drivers.

here is the updated audio driver if you have not installed it.
GA-AX370-Gaming 5 (rev. 1.0) Support | Motherboard - GIGABYTE U.S.A.

there are other ways this can be caused but they are more complex to explain. disable the unused sound sources, remove any extra GPU related software like nvidia share, and gigabyte gpu overclock software would help. Depending on what you use for your sound source, update the chipset and usb 3.0 drivers.
debugging to find the cause, involves making a full kernel dump then looking for a high contention count on some driver.
basically some software lock being held too long and causing other drivers to get behind on processing their requests. When the process exits and frees the lock then the other backed up processes get to execute their code. The result can be something like you described. (bunch of sound after the game exits) hopefully, updated sound drivers and disable unused drivers will fix the issue