Solved Help please: PC acting erratically.

Hi everyone.

My partner's PC has been acting up for a while now. Mostly it has been confined to when she is using Edge, but now it has spread to other apps or even when it is idling.

Yesterday, both screens went dark as she was typing a Word document necessitating a reboot and subsequent loss of said document. The day before the PC just froze on her, meaning a reboot as well. She has not been using Edge now for a few weeks at my insistence, but now the problem is popping up all over.

Mostly the problem is confined to freezing and screens going dark. I have updated all drivers, Windows updates, and the like. Nothing is showing up in Reliability Monitor or the Event Viewer, just an unexpected reboot. I am leaning toward the graphics card as it is an old Radeon R9 280 that I had in my machine way back when and it's running legacy drivers. As well, when the PC freezes, there can still be hard drive activity and the num lock and caps lock lights on the keyboard will go on and off if you press the appropriate keys.

I should note, that the motherboard, GPU and CPU were all used in my machine for a couple of years with no issues. The only thing different about her machine now is the NVMe drive and the PSU.

Some specs:

MB: MSI x470 Gaming Plus Max
CPU: Ryzen 2700X (BIOS does support this CPU)
GPU: XFX Radeon R9 280
PSU: Corsair TX750 750W
SSD: Crucial 1TB M2 NVMe
RAM: GSkill F4-3200 @ 2666 (Won't run at full speed no matter what I do)
Windows 11 Pro 23H2

This is probably something stupid and simple, but I have run out of ideas on where to look for the problem. I hope that someone can help me diagnose this issue.

In this guide, we will be discussing the reasons for computer randomly restarting and tips for troubleshooting a PC that keeps restarting.

If the motherboard has onboard video you could try that to see if it is the videocard.

Good suggestions, both of you.

Unfortunately, it is not randomly restarting. It is freezing and the screens randomly go dark.

My CPU does not have built in graphics, so I can't test it that way, but I did find an old Nvidia GT 1030 laying around, so I pulled out the Radeon card and put that in. We're going to see if that works better. It certainly boots faster with the Nvidia card installed. She doesn't game at all, so the card should be able to handle most of what she does, I would think. Time will tell...

Catnip said:

Good suggestions, both of you.

Unfortunately, it is not randomly restarting. It is freezing and the screens randomly go dark.

My CPU does not have built in graphics, so I can't test it that way, but I did find an old Nvidia GT 1030 laying around, so I pulled out the Radeon card and put that in. We're going to see if that works better. It certainly boots faster with the Nvidia card installed. She doesn't game at all, so the card should be able to handle most of what she does, I would think. Time will tell...

Click to expand...

Hopefully that will solve the problem.

@Catnip

did you install rams on slot proper look like this below for your mobo manual.

Oh yes I did.

May just be a bad nvme. Can you return it for a replacement still?

dacrone said:

May just be a bad nvme. Can you return it for a replacement still?

Click to expand...

Too late to get a replacement, unfortunately.

Update:

I am currently testing the RAM with Memtest86+. We will see how that goes.

8 passes with Memtest86+ and all is well. I think the new video card fixed things, but I'm going to leave the thread open for a few more days to make sure.

Thanks for the responses to date.

Hi,
Need the entire part number for the memory.
Gskill has excellent QVL documents for mother board compatibility listings
You can use cpu-z to get the product numbers to check with on the SPD section

As far as the m.2 goes dough it's the issue but a screen shot of the disk layout never hurts to post for grins.

@ThrashZone I've been away all week, but I will post the information you asked for later today.

Well, two weeks with the new video card and not a freeze in sight during that time. No issues at all, in fact.

I am going to pronounce the Radeon card dead and the problem fixed. Thanks for all the help everyone.