u/Chava_boy

A month ago, my PC crashed while playing a demanding video game. I didn't get a BSOD, but instead had my monitor power off like when turning off the PC, but without my PC turning off. My PC remained stuck like that for minutes, my fans were as loud as when playing demanding games, and pressing the turn off button on the PC case did not help. I eventually had to press the restart button on the PC case, after which there were 3 loud beeps, after which I managed to turn off the PC. After turning it on again, something felt messed up, and it felt slightly sluggish. 20 year old games now had a low framerate and stutter, and my GPU was no longer recognized by my PC (in my device specification it showed that there is no GPU, despite me never taking it out). Trying to play that same demanding game again resulted in a similar thing soon after, so I decided to stop playing games until the problem is solved.

Eventually, with the help of reddit, I managed to somehow solve the problem: I uninstalled the GPU (AMD) drivers completely, and reinstalled them. Since I was also told that RAM may be the issue, I removed my 2 RAM sticks and changed their place. After those two things, my PC worked normally again for a month, everything was like before.

Now, a month or more later, a similar thing happened. While playing a similar game, my PC crashed again, and in the same manner. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers seems to have fixed most of the issues, but now my sound is significantly quieter, on 100% speaker sound it is as loud as it was on 30% before this.

Now, the normal thing to do is to take my PC at a certified technician. But, there's a lot of issues with that (in my country). They often either replace perfectly working parts with new ones and charge extra for that (almost scammed me once like this), charge extra for some stupid reasons, or once my friend gave a laptop with 4 GB of RAM for repairs, only to have it returned with 2 GB, and since his laptop changed a few hands, he couldn't find out who actually stole it, and they all denied it saying that his laptop had only 2GB to begin with. The only one I trust actually said that it works fine now so no need to do anything but if this repeats he'll reinstall the OS (this won't help if the problem is in hardware). I am reluctant to play any demanding games again if this will keep happening and something might get damaged.

I asked on reddit for help, and people explained some things to me, pointing out that the problem might be with RAM, even though my PC recognizes the 16 GB RAM. Also, thanks to a reddit post, I found a report that says that this is a hardware problem (I'll post a pic in the comments). Task manager shows that RAM has around 50% in use, despite the biggest user of RAM is the internet browser at 3.5 GB, and everything total shouldn't exceed 5 GB in use.

What should I do next? What do you suggest? Is it the time to buy some new parts (but the prices are currently disgusting)? Go to shady technicians anyway? Reinstall the OS?

Specs: RAM 16 GB 3000 MHz - 2 sticks, Ryzen R5 2600x , RX 580 8 GB, motherboard B450M S2H

Monitor is 1080p 60Hz, the games in question are Silent Hill F a month ago, and Silent Hill 2 Remake this time (both are a bit more demanding than my specs, but played relatively well anyway).