Bah. A few months ago I started having trouble with games suddenly crashing, often hanging the system and sending the video card fans full blast, with errors in the event log about the display manager crashing. Looked like video card trouble, so I swapped my RTX 2070 out for an old GTX 770 I still had. It seemed better at first, but I’d still get sudden video driver resets that would make things freeze for a few seconds, and the occasional hard system reset. Since it was unlikely that both cards were going bad, my suspicions shifted to the power supply. I want to build a whole new system at some point soon anyway, so I’ve just limped along with it like that for those last couple months now.
Today I just realized that I’d forgotten another factor: at around the same time, I’d hooked up a second monitor, to help make working from home a bit easier. Since I didn’t have the right cabling for the 2070, I hooked the monitor up to the integrated graphics instead. No biggie, since it’s mainly just for displaying some doc and web pages, so it doesn’t need 3D performance. I hadn’t thought about it much since, since it wasn’t the integrated graphics that was crashing, after all. But after I remembered this today, I disabled the integrated graphics and put the 2070 back in and…it’s been fine. It might still be a power supply problem, but I guess something about the extra power draw or stress from enabling the integrated graphics is causing the main video card to glitch out.
So now I can have either working games or a second monitor but not both. Sorry work, but I wanna see what’s new in No Man’s Sky…
Update: Well dangit, after being fine for hours, I had another crash with the 2070. Seems to happen less often, at least? I suspect there may still be a problem with the power supply getting weaker (watt-wise, it should be more than enough), but for now maybe I’ll have to try underclocking it a bit.
Update 2: Ordered and installed a new power supply, and that does indeed seem to have fixed it. The old one was probably overheating, which explains why games would work for a half hour or so and then it would keep crashing even after reboots until it cooled down a bit.