Unexplained full system freezes on Asus Prime RTX 5070 OC + MPG Z390 MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC. (pls help)
I’ve been dealing with intermittent full-system freezes on my PC for a while and cannot reliably reproduce them. The freezes happen randomly during both idle use and gaming.
Main symptoms
- Entire system freezes completely
- Keys are completely unresponsive
- Whatever is on the screen stays frozen permanently
- Audio turns into a buzzing sound when I have earphones plugged in (not looping audio)
- Mouse movement slows to what feels like ~3 FPS for 2–3 seconds before the full freeze
- No BSOD
- No automatic reboot
- Requires manual hard shutdown/restart
Event Viewer / Reliability Monitor
Event Viewer only shows:
- Kernel-Power errors (likely from forced shutdown)
- Reliability Monitor frequently showed:
- `bad_module_info`
- No meaningful dump files or crash logs are generated
- The freeze leaves almost zero footprint diagnostically
System specs
- CPU: i7 9700k
- GPU: RTX 5070
- Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon AC
- RAM: Corsair DDR4 16GB 3200MHz
- PSU: be quiet! 850W
- Platform: Intel Z390 / 9th gen era
Important behavioral clues
- The issue became MUCH more frequent when NVIDIA App (Overlay ON) / GPU utility software was installed (MSI Afterburner)
- Uninstalling MSI Afterburner and keeping NVIDIA Overlay turned OFF reduces crashes from every few hours or so to every other day or so
- Reinstalling MSI Afterburner and tweaking GPU settings made crashes MORE frequent
- Crashes happen regardless of: gaming, idle, desktop usage
Troubleshooting already attempted
- DDU clean uninstall/reinstall of NVIDIA drivers
- Tried older drivers
- No GeForce Experience / NVIDIA App
- GPU underclock + reduced power limit
- Removed MSI Afterburner / RTSS
- Disabled XMP
- Forced PCIe Gen3 in BIOS
- Disabled PCIe Link State Power Management
- Disabled Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS)
- Updated motherboard BIOS to latest available version
- Checked temperatures
- GPU benchmarks/stress tests pass normally
- Issue still occurs unpredictably
Additional relevant history
Previously used this GPU extremely overclocked on a 650W PSU before upgrading to current 850W PSU but I don't THINK it's damaged by overclocking because when benchmarking and playing video games there's
- No visible artifacting
- No benchmark instability
- No black screens
Like what you would usually see if you fried your GPU from overclocking it too hard. But what makes me scared is that for around 4 days of initially using the GPU, there were no crashes at all, then after the first, it started to do it consistently and intermittently so it still might be completely my fault.
Two interesting discoveries
- The first crash started when I was playing Clair Obscur and after the first crash I couldn't even launch the game without freezing my whole system. After I turned off NVIDIA Overlay though, I could play just fine. The weird thing though is that NVIDIA Overlay had been ON ever since I installed the GPU, and I was playing Clair Obscur for exactly four days from 2025-12-12 to 2025-12-16 with no issues initally. (I had overclock and this was on the 650w PSU)
I initially thought the crashes were 100% due to the fact I was overclocking on an underwatted GPU but the crashes continued even after I upgraded to an 850w.
- When checking Reliability Logs, I found that the GameInput installation/reconfiguration would match perfectly in time with most of the system crashes. After completely wiping Microsoft Gameinput from my system, making sure it doesn't reinstall itself on my computer via this guide, the freezes became LESS frequent, but they still happen every 2–3 days.
Current theory
The issue seems more like:
- GPU/PCIe/kernel-level deadlock on the software/BIOS side
- platform compatibility issue
- GPU's bricked or something idk (pls no)
rather than:
- overheating
- obvious RAM failure
- simple driver corruption
Looking for ideas from anyone who has experienced similar “frozen frame + buzzing audio + no logs” behavior, especially on newer NVIDIA GPUs with older Z390 platforms.
For anyone who responds to this post, I can provide screenshots and any other information to the extent of my abilities in order to solve this issue. If you live near enough to me (GTA), I'll even lend over my GPU for testing on a more modern system/motherboard or for a trade in for a RX 9070, though I don't even know if that'd fix my issue.
PS: PLEASE HELP ME I'VE BEEN TRYING TO FIX THIS FOR A YEAR SINCE LAST CHRISTMAS WHEN I GOT IT. I SPENT $900 CAD ON THIS GPU!!