Solved Freezing on FurMark

• B450I Gaming Plus AC
• Ryzen 5 3600
• Crucial Ballistix Gaming Memory, 2x16GB (32GB Kit) DDR4 3600MT/s CL16 Unbuffered DIMM 288pin Red, (PC4-19200), DDR4, BL2K16G36C16U4R
• eVGA GeForce RTX 3070 XC3 Ultra 8GB GDDR6
• Corsair SF750 PSU

• Baldur's Gate 3 performance got choppy after 1 hour, then froze. No BSOD, black screen.
• Immediately after restarting and running FurMark - freezes / screen goes to black about 10-15 seconds into stress test.
• Since last week, on desktop with e.g. many browser windows open, the display gets choppy (like a very poor refresh rate) & mouse will lag (no freezes though).
• Desktop choppiness started about a week ago.

• https://imgur.com/a/q53vgOv

• Reinstalled older driver (546.33 from Dec 2023) resetting to default settings (no recent hardware changes, that was the only driver change).
• Ran Prime95 - stable with no freezes.
• Ran Windows memory diagnostic on restart, no issues.

• Thinking it's graphics card or PSU failing, any way to tell which or if it's another possible issue? Was wondering about the 11.712 V reading on the +12V rail.
• Could it be the motherboard? I've had some issues (BSOD) before with the NVME slot which seemed to have gone away after I re-seated it and added a cooling pad. One thing to note, I have a sandwich style SFF PC case (FormD T1 v1.1) and the NVME is rear mounted on the motherboard and sits behind the graphics card so it tends to get high temperature (up to 85 degrees on HWMonitor).
• I don't have any spare graphics card to test unfortunately.

SlicEnDicE said:

I think it's your storage getting hot, that is the issue. Could you try manually adding a temporary fan there to keep it cool while testing?

Also that 12V rail seem a bit low...but may still not be the issue.

Click to expand...

redsky said:

Thank you both for your help - it turns out the PCI-E riser cable was loose!

Click to expand...