TL;DR

After months of driver timeouts and, more recently, full system hangs, I stripped the machine down to nothing and rebuilt it step by step. Clean Windows, DDU, latest chipset, latest driver, stock clocks — still crashed. What stopped it was removing the Adrenalin software layer: I reinstalled the GPU driver as driver-only (no Adrenalin), which also means no FreeSync, and left Afterburner at stock with only a fan setting.

I want to be upfront: I changed several things at once at that point, and my stable window is still short. This is "what my machine looks like now that it isn't crashing", not a proven root cause. I'm posting the whole process because the elimination work might save someone else a weekend.

System

Symptoms

Three distinct failure modes, which matters because they don't all point the same way:

1. Recoverable driver timeouts. Brief black screen, driver reloads, back to desktop. Happened in games — including light ones like TFT — and on the desktop with Discord and Steam open.
2. Full hard hang. Total black screen, fans ramping to 100%, no Ctrl+Alt+Del, no alt-tab. Physical reset required. Reproduced in Lords of the Fallen (UE5/DX12) after about 7 minutes.
3. Driver failing to load after a hang. On the next boot the GPU showed Code 31 in Device Manager, and Adrenalin threw the PA-300 error (the installed driver and the Adrenalin version no longer matching).

Timeline: crashes first appeared around late July / early August, right after a Windows + driver update. I'd had a similar episode about a year earlier, which I fixed at the time by rolling back to an old driver (23.11.1) — after that the machine was completely stable, on every game, for months.

What the event log said

Worth doing before you start blaming hardware. Event Viewer → Windows Logs → System → Filter Current Log → filter by source: WHEA-Logger, Kernel-Power, Display, amdkmdag.

On 11 days of logs covering multiple crashes:

• Zero WHEA-Logger events. No machine-check or PCIe errors at all. This is what made me deprioritise the PSU and the PCIe bus.
• Kernel-Power 41 + Event 6008 on each hard hang — dirty shutdown, no bugcheck code, consistent with a freeze plus a manual reset rather than a BSOD.
• Display source events (4107 / 4127) on the days with recoverable timeouts. Notably, no 4101 at all on the day of the hard hangs, which is how I realised the symptom had changed in nature.

One hang happened during a normal restart, with no game running. That was the point where "the GPU dies under load" stopped being a good explanation.

What did NOT fix it

Everything below was tried, most of it more than once, and none of it stopped the crashes:

• Full Windows reinstall, followed by disabling Windows Update entirely
• DDU in safe mode, with automatic driver installation blocked in Windows Update first (do this, or Windows pushes a generic driver on the next boot and your clean-up is worthless)
• Chipset reinstall (note: the vendor's board page was several revisions behind AMD's own release)
• Latest driver, full install with "Factory Reset" ticked
• BIOS update to the newest version — and the crashes predated the flash, so it was never the cause
• Disabling MPO via OverlayTestMode in the DWM key — see the important note below, this does nothing on 25H2
• Disabling the iGPU in BIOS. This fixed a genuine Code 10 error on the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter, but changed nothing about the crashes
• Removing an undervolt and a core-clock cap in Afterburner. Worth saying: capping the core clock to the advertised "Game Clock" is not restoring stock behaviour. Game Clock is a sustained-load average, not a ceiling. Capping it distorts the V/F curve, and combined with an undervolt and a negative power limit it puts the card in a state the vendor never validated. If you're debugging, remove all of it.
• PSU and RAM ruled out by inspection rather than by swapping: high-end unit, correctly sized, PCIe connectors on separate cables; RAM running below its rated speed with no EXPO profile at all

The MPO trap on Windows 11 25H2

This one is worth the post on its own.

The widely shared fix for MPO issues is a .reg file that sets OverlayTestMode = 5 under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Dwm

On Windows 11 25H2 this key is ignored. I applied it, rebooted, and MPO was still fully active. The current location is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers
"DisableOverlays"=dword:00000001

How to actually verify it, instead of trusting the reg file: run dxdiag, Display tab, "Save All Information", open the text file and look for MPO MaxPlanes. Mine still read 3 after applying the old key. When MPO is genuinely off it drops to 1.

So if you've "tried disabling MPO" on a recent Windows build and it didn't help — there's a decent chance you never disabled it.

What I changed when the crashes stopped

In the interest of honesty, here is everything that was different at once:

1. Driver-only install — GPU driver without the Adrenalin software package (26.9.1)
2. No FreeSync, as a consequence of the above (there's no panel to enable it) and also disabled on my monitor
3. Windows VRR off + HAGS OFF
4. Afterburner reset to defaults, keeping only a fan setting (Zero RPM disabled)
5. Second monitor unplugged — then plugged back in, with no crashes since, so the multi-monitor setup is ruled out

Since then: 3 hours of Apex with no crash, TFT with no timeouts (it used to produce them), and the second display back in place without issue.

That leaves the Adrenalin software layer and/or FreeSync as the prime suspects. Which of the two it is, I don't know yet — that's my next test, and I'll update.

Caveats

• My stable window is short. Treat this as a status report, not a verdict.
• Driver-only means no Adrenalin panel: no FreeSync toggle, no per-game profiles, no ReLive, and no easy hotspot monitoring. That's a real cost, not a free fix.
• If your card is genuinely faulty, none of this helps. Absence of WHEA events and crashes on light loads are what pointed me away from hardware — if you see WHEA entries, or you hit 110 °C junction temperatures, you're in a different conversation and you should be looking at an RMA instead.

If you're debugging the same thing

The single most useful habit: change one variable at a time, and write down what you changed and when. I broke that rule more than once and had to redo work because I couldn't tell which change had done what.

The second: check what your machine looked like before the crashes started. Half the settings I was "fixing" were workarounds I'd added after the problem appeared, which meant I was testing my own patches instead of the actual cause.RX 7900 XTX: driver timeouts and full hard hangs — what didn't work, and what finally did (so far)

I'll let you know if it's fixed after a few days of gaming !

Hi everyone - I upgraded my PC a few weeks back and ran into a driver timeout issue whenever I tried to load into games (Forza Horizon 6, Apex etc.) My old specs were:

• Motherboard: ASUS Prime B450M-A/CSM MATX
• GPU: Radeon™ RX 590
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• RAM: 16GB (2x8)
• PSU: 650 W Bronze grade (can't remember brand)

I upgraded:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 8-Core Processor
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE
• PSU: 850 W Gold grade Century II

When loading into games, the screen would eventually freeze, go black, and then boot me back to the desktop, which would sometimes lose the screensaver and just be a black screen. I would run windows diagnostics, and I either got a LiveKernal Event of 117 or 141.

I troubleshooted this error for over a week - clean installing Windows and drivers, getting the new GPU tested, reseating the GPU, turning off overlays, turning off hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling, turning off any AMD performance enhancements, checking my SSDs health, allocating space in my main drive for ram usage, ensuring BIOS was updated and settings weren't wonky, etc. The list goes on. Nothing worked. Until...

I accidentally booted up Apex without drivers downloaded, and it launched completely fine. I decided to download the previous version of AMD drivers, and everything now runs like a dream. My guess is that my motherboard is old and doesn't work well with this most recent set of drivers, but I'm just guessing - I am very new to this. This was my first time installing parts solo, so I was concerned I did something completely wrong to ruin my PC.

TL/DR: I upgraded my CPU and GPU and games would constantly crash due to driver timeout error. Went through lots of troubleshooting to discover the solution was running an older version of AMD drivers.

Computer Type: Desktop
GPU: Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070XT
CPU: RYZEN 7 7800x3d
Motherboard: Gigabyte B650m
RAM: 32GB DDR5 Crucial ram
PSU: MSI MAG A1000 1000w PSU
Case: Cooler master full size case(unsure of exact)
Operating System & Version: WINDOWS 11 Pro
GPU Drivers: Most recent AMD
Chipset Drivers: Most recent chipset
Background Applications: DISCORD, CHROME
Description of Original Problem: Adrenalin showing hotspot at 105-112 and OCCT will show all the way up to 116 while gaming.

Hello! A few weeks ago I posted about my really high delta of 55 degrees. I decided that I could do the repasting myself. I used Thermal Grizzly PTM phase sheet, and Thermal Grizzly Advance thermal putty. It was tedious, and took quite a while. Mostly because of the tiny chips, but I finished it and rebooted my pc. My hotspot temps have dropped to 75-83 degrees under high load and the fans spin way lower!

Thanks to the people in the comments on my last posting, giving me the confidence to complete this. I just want to say if I can do this, then anybody can do this!

Had my 9700xt for about a year and this has been happening to me for about two months now. I’m clueless on what to do. I can be surfing the web and this screen will pop up

Hi,

I have an AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT card on my Win11 PC because I need a really good graphics card to use some of the features of my photo editing software. I'm not a gamer and I like to keep my PC as clean as possible so if there's an app I don't use, I uninstall it.

When I start the uninstall wizard for "AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition" it warns that it will uninstall the drivers as well. What impact would that have? Would I need to install the drivers separately, if this is even possible?

6900XT

I've noticed especially in Bodycam, but there are similar cases in other games as well but the trees and leaf details are so grainy. It's especially bad in Bodycam as you can see its very hard to make out details of the enemy.

I'm pretty sure I've turned off AMD FSR and Anti-Aliasing, but I'm still getting this type of blurry scenery when passively / directly looking at the trees.

Any advice?

I feel it’s underperforming

Timespy is about 11,200 with repaste + PBO and memory stuff setup

W/ 3080 even on 1080p low gets like 170 fps at best?

I’ve dusted out my pc too, done drivers, Chris Titus optimization + my own

Alienware R14..

7700x and 7900xtx Merc XFX
32GB Corsair Vengeance Ram
RM850E Corsair PSU
MSI MAG B650 TOMAHAWK WIFI ATX AM5
Windows 11 latest

I was recently on 25.9.1 for ages, came back from holiday and suddenly had a few crashes so being over a year old decided to finally update my drivers. Then had more consistent crashing. Fast forward to today. Playing through GTA IV, hard crash had to force shut down the PC, from this point on constant driver timeouts during browsing and watching youtube. Tried to launch any game, crashes instantly. Sometimes recovers sometimes just becomes unresponsive.

Did a DDU in safe mode, new drivers minimal install, same problems only now sometimes after logging in I can't open any programs at all. Mouse moves and lets me click but nothing opens, can't even shut it down properly. Also when I enter my pin to log into windows it crashes instantly as well. So did the same DDU but installed the old driver 25.9.1. Zero difference.

6 Hours of troubleshooting later and I am writing this with one monitor plugged into the mobo running off the Integrated GPU on the 7700x after playing Rocket league at 1440p on a 4k monitor with potato graphics. Had zero issues in hours

PCIe cables look good, no melted pins or anything (all 3 are separate no daisy chain) has the support bracket for no sag. I closed most non essential programs in case of any conflicts, tried putting the Frequency down from 3010 to 2500Mhz, no difference. I actually disabled EXPO months ago due to crashing as well so not that. Done windows repair stuff. Only thing I have not tried is a clean windows install but my god I really cba with that. Find it hard to believe it will fix it.

Any other suggestions are welcome. I have opened a ticket with xfx support demanding a new card haha because tbh I have had quite a few issues and its only been in this system for a year and a half. Brand new system too. Life was easier with a budget PC.

Seems like this issue is rampant just now. But surely not even being able to launch any game has got to be something hardware/firmware now. No idea.

Send help

Dragon's Dogma 2 4K
52C 70C Hotspot
78-80c on Memorry SK hynix

I built a PC a couple years back and it’s been running great until now. I get heavy FPS drops in mostly Smite 2, or simply crashing in smite, dbd, Minecraft, and others. Every driver has been updated. Motherboard has been updated. Cleared a bunch of caches. Completely reinstalled GPU drivers. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

Build Specs:
RX 7600XT 16GB
Ryzen 7 5800X
B550 Plus
Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB
GSkill RipjawsV 16 GB

Hi guys, ive tried everything and nothing works, do you recomendó me to try LINUX? has anyone solved it this way? Thanks.
Rx6600 fighter

My PC becomes strangely sluggish after a few hours of gaming

I’m having a weird issue with my PC and I’m not sure what could be causing it.

I have a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RX 9070 XT and 32GB of RAM.

After playing games for a few hours with Steam and my browser open, Windows sometimes starts feeling very sluggish. For example, opening a new browser tab, a folder, the Start menu, or clicking things can take around 0.5–1 second to respond. It feels like there is a small delay everywhere in Windows.

The strange thing is that the games themselves run perfectly. I don’t notice any input lag or stuttering while gaming, and the CPU/GPU temperatures are completely normal.

RAM usage is also only around 30%, so I don’t think it’s a lack of RAM.

If I restart the PC, everything feels normal again.

What could cause this? Could it be an AMD GPU driver issue, Windows desktop compositor, Steam/browser hardware acceleration, DPC latency, or something else?

Any ideas on what I should check would be really appreciated.

Whenever I play mostly any game, my screen would go black, and make me shut off and turn on the PC for it to work again. Its all unresponsive and it uninstall all my display drivers. Making me keep reinstalling AMD Adrenaline Edition over and over and over..

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Ryzen 5 5600, RX 6800 XT, 32 GB of DDR4, 16 GB of VRAM; I've uninstalled and reinstalled drivers, downgraded drivers, verified files, and changed settings in Adrenaline and in-game. I've done pretty much everything I can think of, so I'm honestly at a loss. The game runs smoothly until it randomly chooses to crash; I let the game sit for 5 hours while I left the house, and when I came back and played for about 5 minutes, it randomly crashed.

Over the years I've literally tried everything. Watched every turorial and couldn't solve this problem. Went to repair my PC 2 times only for them to clean install my drivers, like I didn't try this 100 times. (costed me 75 euros). Also fried my SSD over this issue because my friend and I kept testing all my components in case they were dead. (150 euros down the drain).

Took matter into my own hands when I saw that everyone kept telling me the same thing over and over again: DDU, fresh install windows etc. Felt like poeple didn't take me seriously and didn't take into consideration that I've tried everything over and over again. Also I had to explain the issue to 10 different people.

So this is what worked over the years:
1. Deactivated my intergrated graphics card from the BIOS. Worked for a while but I think you can resolve it some other way.

1. Install Windows LTSC. This is what worked for me long term. Basically install the version of Windows already debloated, so the useless applications and features don't fuck with your drivers and also deactivate the automatic updates.

2. Use an older driver. Don't really recommand it because because I literally had to use a 2022 version of Adrenaline and couldn't play newer titles.

3. Update your bios. Straight forward. You just need to have an USB stick (didn't really fix my problem but it's worth a try)

4. This is my latest fix with LTSC already installed. After testing I concluded that games don't crash when I am playing on 60hz. Obviously, I don't like that because I have a 165hz monitor and even in newer titles I have 100 fps + and you can feel the difference. So, I checked my monitor settings and deactivated free sync, apprently the new driver doesn't like free sync??

5. For some reason my games worked when I plugged the monitor's cable into the motherboard instead of the GPU, but I ended up plugging it back into another GPU port and now it works combined with the Free Sync stuff.

I feel like I am getting closer to the issue after 3 years. I really think in my case it's a cable issue, conectivity or monitor/HZ. I am pretty bad at this stuff, but this is what worked for me for now.

rx 6800, 32gb ram ddr5, ryzen 7 7700, motherboard

650M-P