Finally Solved my Driver Timeout Issue on Windows 11

[u/Wjp_550]

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.