[Troubleshooting] PC Crashes in Games (Black Screen, No Sound)

Posted by aaaasimar@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 9 comments

Hi, sorry to add the the never-ending troublshooting posts but I'm very quickly running out of ideas.

The Problem

While gaming, my PC will suddenly crash. Both of my monitors go black, and I get a one-second "BRRR" sound through my 3.5mm headset before it goes silent. The PC itself stays on (fans keep spinning), but it's completely unresponsive, and I have to do a hard reset by holding the power button.

I mainly play Overwatch 2 (and occasionally Marvel Rivals) on reasonably-low settings with framerate capped. The crashes first started while playing Marvel Rivals, but the new "Switch Shader Complimation Mode" seems to have fixed things. In Overwatch, the crashes are more common while playing the new Stadium gamemode, but I've also them in ranked and custom games. They are inconsistent, happening after playing for anywhere from 20m to 3h.

My temps seem to be within normal ranges:

There appears to be nothing in any the Event Viewer logs. It goes from (what looks like) logs from normal operation straight to system startup.

I have ran the OCCT 12h Platinum Stability Certificate test with seemily no issues, but then it will crash \~30 minutes later. I guess that's just due to differences between synthetic and real-world loads.

Attempting to restart my graphics driver (Win + Ctrl + Shift + B) doesn't seem to have any affect

Note: When I first build the PC I did have intermittent crashes when I enabled the stock XMP profile for my memory. I was able to consistenty recreate this in the OCCT stability test, and was solved by icreasing the DRAM voltage from 1.30V to 1.35V and this hasn't been an issue since.

System Specifications

I've Tried

I unfortuntaly don't have spare motherboards, memory, GPUs, or CPUs lying around to test with. I also don't have a consistent way to trigger the crash so any potential fix is "wait and see".

The only thing I can think of is it still being my PSU. If my SF600 isn't able to handle some power-spikes and the overload protection is triggered, that would explain a lot of the symptoms.

I chose 600W based on PC Part Pickers estimated wattage of \~500W, but it turns out it's recommended to use at least 750W with the 6800 XT. I did purchase as SF1000 in an attempt to fix this but, after I had the exact same crash with the new PSU, I returned it to save £150. I don't really have an explaination for why it wouldn't work with the new PSU, other than I potentially had a faulty model.

Potential Options

Are there any other suggestions for fixes or troubleshooting?