My PC constantly freezes if I’m not playing a game or have a game running.
✅ If I’m playing a game, it’s fine.
✅ If I have a game running in the background while doing other stuff, it’s fine.
❌ If I leave my PC while playing a game and the lock screen pops up, it will freeze.
❌ If I do anything other than gaming, such as browsing the web or digital art, PC will freeze.
❌ If PC goes to sleep overnight, it will freeze.
The frozen PC will typically show no error code and display will show “no input” until I hard reset.
If I hard reset, it often won’t successfully turn back on unless I move the mouse while it’s resetting, otherwise it will freeze again on the windows loading screen.
Sometimes I will actually get a blue screen with the error code of DPC_Watchdog_Error or something like that.
Anyone know where I should look first to try and fix this? It’s been happening for weeks now and it’s driving me crazy. I can’t figure it out.
I used to have a very similar problem also with freezers that do not occur when a game is running even in the background. I also followed dead ends such as CPU state issues and so on.
The biggest breakthrough came after several years when I took the entire SSD out of the laptop and put it into a desktop PC with entirely different hardware and booted the same Windows there. The problem still occurred!
A complete Windows reinstall fixed it for good.
I’ll try all these suggestions first then try a windows reinstall
Shit, I’d start with the reinstall personally
watchdog error, sleep and lockscreen freezing, and stable under some load tells me either the cpu isn’t getting enough voltage if it’s manually oc’d, or there’s some bios or os powersaving thing malfunctioning.
reset bios settings, especially if you’ve done any overclocking. turn off any core boost or other variable core clock powersaving amd/intel specific ‘features’; these are almost always unstable in my experience.
if that doesn’t work, double check all power cables are properly seated in both mobo/component side and psu side if it’s modular. make sure ram is seated properly. if you’re on windows make sure you’re on high performance mode. i can’t think of much else to check without more info. good luck!
This! Undervolting to oc is known to be unstable at idle or low usage both for cpu and gpu.