Computer randomly freezes. WoW screen goes black

Off-Topic Games, Gaming and Hardware
1

Hey everyone!

I’ve been having some issues with my PC. It’s a holiday special i5 with a 1660TI and it about 2 years old now.

It randomly freezes every ~30 minutes to an hour. It’s just for a second or two when doing regular stuff like internet, word, etc. It’s not ideal but tolerable. The same thing happens in game but sometimes the screen goes black for a couple of seconds. It then brings me to desktop and I can click back on wow and things are okay again. It straight drops me out of Diablo 2 Resurrected and OW is hit or miss. Of course, it’s now to the point that I am dying because I can’t get out of the bad and causing wipes.

I originally thought it was my video card but the temps are low according to the nvidia program. I even bumped up the fan speed on it and it did not help. I bought a new PSU because the stock one was some random Lenovo one but that did not help either.
You can hear it make a noise as it happens. Something “pauses” or “thinks” for a second. I guess that would be the hard drive but it is a SSD. I didn’t think they made noises per say.

I really don’t want to format but that was going to be my last try at fixing it.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

2

Some bad windows files maybe? Can try this and see if it finds anything.

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3

so it’s minimizing the game window?

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4

It sounds like a TDR error - Time-out, Detection, and Recovery. Basically the display driver is taking too long to respond to the system, resulting in it being restarted. Some programs handle this more gracefully than others, in that they’ll either just come back to where they were or minimize, but other programs will lose their rendering “surface” and simply fail to recover it.

Unfortunately there’s no “one size fits all” solution to TDR issues. It can represent anything from a software glitch up to partial graphics hardware failure, and a host of things in between. If SFC and DISM don’t help, per Canadiana’s suggestion, I’d be looking to do a complete re-install of your graphics drivers. Use Wagnard’s DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) to completely clear out your old ones, and download a fresh set of drivers straight from NVidia rather than any 3rd party site.

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