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It comes and goes, occasionally I'll go a month or two without any issue.

There were no hardware changes that first started this happening, my computer just began freezing completely independent of whatever I'm doing - gaming, watching youtube, idle, etc. When it freezes, there is absolutely no way to get it back without hard rebooting, and if I leave it frozen for a while, the fans will get incredibly loud until I do the reboot.

The single time I've been able to recover without a hard restart after the computer froze was unplugging the HDMI cable (connected to my secondary monitor) from my GPU, plugging it into the motherboard's HDMI port (it didn't come on), and then plugging it back into the GPU's HDMI port.

On top of freezing, it will occasionally instantly shut off with no warning. When either of these things happen, it's anybody's guess if it will struggle to boot again - most often it will. It starts to boot, the lights come on internally, and then it'll randomly shut off again, and continue trying this cycle until it works. During this time, the fan lights and whatever other lights inside go on and off sporadically.

I initially thought it was PSU related, so I got a new one - same problem. I have tried memtest, during which the computer froze about 4 hours in (32gb ram) and never recovered (it showed 0 errors at the time of freezing for what its worth), so I pulled out two of the memory sticks in hopes they were the problem - but it changed nothing.

PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3Jq4QP

  • CPU: Intel Core i5-8600K 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor ($205.00 @ Amazon)
  • CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler
  • Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Gaming 3 (rev. 1.0) ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
  • Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-2400 CL15 Memory
  • Memory: Patriot Viper 4 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory
  • Storage (OS): Samsung 860 Evo 500 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
  • Storage: Samsung 860 Evo 500 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
  • Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive
  • Video Card: Gigabyte GAMING OC GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8 GB Video Card
  • Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro ATX Full Tower Case
  • Power Supply: Corsair RM850x (2021) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
  • Monitor (Primary/DP): Dell S2716DG 27.0" 2560 x 1440 144 Hz Monitor
  • Monitor (Secondary/HDMI): Asus VS248H-P 24.0" 1920 x 1080 Monitor

Windows 11 Education installed on one of the SSDs.

Here are my event viewer logs from an hour when it occurred, let me know if a broader time range would be more useful.

Here's a video of the boot loop.

I would greatly appreciate any help.

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  • If you can, create a USB stick with a live Linux environment on it and see if it has the same problem. At least it will rule out a problem with your current OS install. To possibly further determine the problem, it will depend on how far you're willing to do things yourself. You can run from USB and disconnect all your storage. Run without the discrete graphics card, ...
    – Silbee
    Commented Apr 6 at 21:25
  • out of curiosity, does the numlock light on the keyboard go on/off if you hit the key while its frozen?
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Apr 6 at 22:41
  • @Silbee Well I went a bit further with this - I completely wiped my SSD and reinstalled windows 11 pro from scratch, and the computer worked perfectly for about 8 hours straight. And then it froze again. My event viewer logs are completely empty at the time the freeze happened, and when I hard shut down the system and restarted it, it went into a boot loop again. I tried changed the graphics card to a new PCIE slot, but it did not affect anything.
    – runni
    Commented Apr 7 at 13:05
  • @FrankThomas Unfortuantely I'm using a custom keyboard with no num lock specifically - but when it froze about 20 minutes ago, I did test the keyboard and all of the lighting was working while the screen was frozen. I was in a discord call at the time and no audio was coming or going, the system completely froze.
    – runni
    Commented Apr 7 at 13:06
  • You could try running without the discrete graphics card. The only way i see you solving this is by elimination. I'd start from 1 ssd, 1 RAM stick, 1 monitor and it least try to have it run memtest for a good few hours without locking up.
    – Silbee
    Commented Apr 7 at 23:22

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