Black Screen during gaming with Strix G15

[NinetyNineTails]

I'm getting full shutdown crashes while gaming. It's semi-predictable, only occurring in certain games during what appears to be high particle effect density effects.

Asus ROG Strix G15, purchased January 2023. AMD Ryzen 9 5980XH CPU, Radeon RX 6800M GPU, 16 GB RAM

The crashes have occurred while playing Aliens: Dark Descent and Dark Souls Remastered (running with the Re-Remastered graphical upgrade mod). It very rarely occurs during Dark Souls 2: SotFS. I haven't seen it happen during Elden Ring. It can reliably be triggered in Dark Soul Remastered by using a healing effect while a large enemy's death dissolve is playing, leading me to suspect that high particle effect densities are somehow a triggering factor.

The only error I've been able to extract has been from Event Viewer, showing Kernel-Power critical error, Error ID 41. Looking online, this seems to usually occur due to loss of power. Heat on the CPU and GPU appear to be well within tolerances, according to AMD Adrenaline immediately before a shutdown event. My PSU is plugged directly into a wall outlet and doesn't show obvious signs of malfunction.

Per Error ID 41, power issues is the most usual suspect, but is that normal in a laptop? I would have assumed the battery would represent a fallback if the PSU isn't supplying enough power during times of high draw, but I'm far from an expert in such issues. How might I test that?

[NinetyNineTails]

Unfortunately, I worked at some length on what you posted, both directly from your sources and several variations on them with processor power settings as well as standby options, but wasn't able to keep Warframe and Marvel Rivals from blackscreening my system. I did manage to greatly reduce the problem in Warframe by limiting its framerate to 60 FPS (unbound it was touching 120 except in the most intense scenes), but it was still periodically blackscreening. Support here suggests a full OS reinstall and if that doesn't resolve things, look into getting a tech to diagnose a hardware fault.

[Luciifer]

Did you manage to get the high performance mode active? This was the key factor in my black screens stopping

[NinetyNineTails]

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@Luciifer wrote:

Did you manage to get the high performance mode active? This was the key factor in my black screens stopping

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Sadly, yes, that was one of the things I was able to get active but failed to resolve the problem. I also created a custom power plan, trying both 90% and 99% power throttles, without success. Armoury Crate was a hassle and it took some work before I realized that it was setting the power plan back to one of its own settings and away from what I was enabling in Control Panel, but uninstalling Crate gave me more control over the power settings; sadly, this also didn't resolve things. I worked through High Performance, Crate's Turbo, and the custom power plan and kept having the blackscreens with all of them.

It was not the cheery-est Christmas Eve of my lifetime.

I'm going to do the OS reinstall in a few days; I don't quite have the élan vital to do it on Christmas Day.

[Luciifer]

I'd recommend changing or cleaning the Fans by opening your shell, holding down the turning part of the fan itself and spraying it with an air can, if you don't hold down the fan while spraying it there is a high chance it will spin too fast and break the bearings inside, how old is your PC? It might also be thermal paste, it appears that it isn't software related, also I can't remember are you using Windows 11?

Do you notice any buzzing or grinding type of sounds from the fan during gameplay?  

[rog_]

Hey, let us know

[NinetyNineTails]

It's a Strix G15, two years old. I've checked the heat leading up to blackscreen events and so far as I can tell, it's not a cooling problem. Worth checking the fans, though, at least.

And, yeah, Win 11. I had to adapt some of what you linked earlier for that, as a lot of it was written for Win 10, but I'm pretty sure I did so cleanly.

[Luciifer]

I think if you revert from 11 to 10 and apply the fix you'd have success, I know for me it wasn't a cooling problem even though every single post I read about was referring to a cooling problem either with the fans or thermal paste, both of which I replaced and still faced the black screen issues, like I said I didn't test the fix on Win 11 but it definitely works on Windows 10.

[NinetyNineTails]

I'm not sure I have the option to downgrade to 10. The system shipped with 11. I'll definitely keep the distinction in mind when I keep working on it. I took a few days off Problems, all of them, for Christmas; I'll drop back in here in a day or two when I get back to work on the problem.

[Luciifer]

Sure thing, and you can absolutely downgrade to Windows 10, I've upgraded to Windows 11 then Downgraded to Windows 10 multiple times now. You can do so using a flash drive and getting the appropriate files right here from the Windows Website itself. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-installation-media-for-windows-99a58364-8c02-206f...

Cheers.