My PC constantly freezes if I’m not playing a game or have a game running.
✅ If I’m playing a game, it’s fine.
✅ If I have a game running in the background while doing other stuff, it’s fine.
❌ If I leave my PC while playing a game and the lock screen pops up, it will freeze.
❌ If I do anything other than gaming, such as browsing the web or digital art, PC will freeze.
❌ If PC goes to sleep overnight, it will freeze.
The frozen PC will typically show no error code and display will show “no input” until I hard reset.
If I hard reset, it often won’t successfully turn back on unless I move the mouse while it’s resetting, otherwise it will freeze again on the windows loading screen.
Sometimes I will actually get a blue screen with the error code of DPC_Watchdog_Error or something like that.
Anyone know where I should look first to try and fix this? It’s been happening for weeks now and it’s driving me crazy. I can’t figure it out.
watchdog error, sleep and lockscreen freezing, and stable under some load tells me either the cpu isn’t getting enough voltage if it’s manually oc’d, or there’s some bios or os powersaving thing malfunctioning.
reset bios settings, especially if you’ve done any overclocking. turn off any core boost or other variable core clock powersaving amd/intel specific ‘features’; these are almost always unstable in my experience.
if that doesn’t work, double check all power cables are properly seated in both mobo/component side and psu side if it’s modular. make sure ram is seated properly. if you’re on windows make sure you’re on high performance mode. i can’t think of much else to check without more info. good luck!
Is there any real benefit to overclocking a CPU in the past ten or so years? It doesn’t seem to me like that’s been much of a performance bottleneck anymore compared to the GPU
i mean, it depends on the cpu and your workload. i have a 1st gen ryzen 1500 and amd rx580 gpu, so yeah, my cpu is the bottleneck in this build. i do have it slightly oc’d and it def helps a bit keep it smoother gameplay especially when travelling fast in game and new areas need to load up. the pop-in and small frame dips are a bit more noticeable on stock clock speed. did i really need to oc it? nah. but i like to squeeze every last bit of capability out of my hardware just for the fun of it, too.
I was also getting watchdog error a while back and it took me months to figure out. Ended up being the CPU, not overclocked just crapped out. I replaced everything, MB, ram, gpu, ssd, power supply and multiple OS’s before replacing the cpu. Mine was also randomly locking up, usually overnight idle but other times as well.
One other possibility would be some kind of malware (like one for mining bitcoins) which tries to be sneaky and activates when your computer is not busy, but a bug in it causes your PC to crash.
Have you reset your bios back to defaults and made sure you’re on the latest?
Sounds like something to do with the power states or clock boost.
Google suggests perhaps a bad a Realtek WiFi driver associated with DPC watchdog BSOD / kernel panic.
To diagnose that, remove all wireless adapters and boot.
More generally, symptoms on this scale on modern operating systems mean that the crashes are in kernel mode code, which mostly means device drivers of some type.
So a decent diagnostic method is to remove pieces of hardware one at a time to see if there’s one that clears up the issue.
I used to have a very similar problem also with freezers that do not occur when a game is running even in the background. I also followed dead ends such as CPU state issues and so on.
The biggest breakthrough came after several years when I took the entire SSD out of the laptop and put it into a desktop PC with entirely different hardware and booted the same Windows there. The problem still occurred!
A complete Windows reinstall fixed it for good.
By the way, I also made a program that keeps one CPU core only busy at 100 % in a lowest priority thread. IIRC, it worked.
public class Busy { public static void main(String... args) { int i = 0; Thread.currentThread().setPriority(Thread.MIN_PRIORITY); while (true) { i = (i << 3) ^ i; } } }
(With a JDK installed: javac Busy.java && java Busy)
Also found this in my bookmarks, but it didn’t help back then, and OP never got it solved either: https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/pc-freezes-when-not-playing-games.3731029/
My freeze did not have your odd reset problems. Its own oddity was that often it was a semi-zombie-freeze, in that I could sometimes even type text into an open editor and open menus, but nothing ever happened, saved or executed.