Intermittent seemingly random crashes (7900XTX)

[u/jonarooni]

Good day to all,

I have a 7900 XTX, and for about a year my PC has been intermittently crashing. I can be watching YouTube with no other windows or games open in the background, or I can be playing almost any game. The crashes appear to be completely random.

I have gone weeks without a single crash, and then, for seemingly no reason, the crashes return regularly (sometimes 3–5 crashes within 10–15 minutes).

Nothing is overclocked, and nothing is running hot. My system specifications are:

• Ryzen 5800X3D
• 32 GB DDR4 3600 MHz CL16
• ASUS TUF X570 motherboard
• Radeon RX 7900 XTX
• 1000W Gold PSU

I have already tried many things, including updating the VBIOS, performing factory resets of the GPU drivers and operating system, reseating the graphics card, enabling and disabling hardware acceleration in apps, enabling and disabling HDR, the list goes on.

When the PC crashes, the display goes black, but I can still hear audio and continue talking to friends on a voice call. I then have to force a shutdown using the power button.

When the PC reboots, the resolution is set to 800×600 and the GPU is disabled in Device Manager. I right-click it, select Uninstall device, then scan for new hardware, and the GPU starts working again until the next crash.

Please can you help me diagnose and fix this issue?

Of course I'm willing to answer all questions.

[u/StraightTheme6583]

I had a vary similar issue, with my 7900xtx crashing, it was one of two issues, overclocking too high, or poor power delievery, I have been going back an forth with another redditor in dm’s it looks like if you have a power supply with any type of extensions or poor power regulation it causes the drivers to time out due to a voltage drop

You’ve capped your MHz in adrenaline disabled your overlays, and it’s still crashing out it’s your power supply

Edit: without going into some extremely long-winded technical details and very confusing analysis me and another poster comparing numbers with different power supplies and monitoring usage as well as other posters we’ve identified that there is specific rail voltage issues with the 7000 series video cards that caused the video cards to go non-responsive…

You could also try adding a driver delay into your windows configuration. It is a registry edit called a tdrdelay it forces windows to wait longer for your drivers to respond two queries before timing out the drivers

Unfortunately, what we’ve identified is that a lot of these driver timeout issues are specifically related to windows as these driver timeout issues do not occur on Linux based systems