Hi guys,

Any help here would be amazing!

I built my PC around 4 years ago. Starting about a year ago (give or take) it began "freezing" when I put any strain on it.

Three things I need to point out:
- I don't know if "freezing" is the correct term. The monitors go black and I need to hold the power button to shut it off and press power again to get it to come back to life.
- I am literally playing Old School RuneScape one account on low detail. If I attempt to play another account, it usually freezes.
- I clean it pretty regularly and haven't found that cleaning it helps the freezing.

Although I did build this computer, I don't really know how to determine why it's doing this. If it's as simple as upgrading something, I would love to know what to start with!

Specs:

Driver: Game Ready Driver - 566.36 - Thu Dec 5, 2024
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz
RAM: 16.0 GB
Storage (2): SSD - 465.8 GB,HDD - 931.5 GB

Graphics card
GPU processor: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660
Direct3D feature level: 12_1
CUDA cores: 1408
Graphics clock: 1830 MHz
Resizable bar: No
Memory data rate: 8.00 Gbps
Memory interface: 192-bit
Memory bandwidth: 192.048 GB/s
Total available graphics memory: 14295 MB
Dedicated video memory: 6144 MB GDDR5
System video memory: 0 MB
Shared system memory: 8151 MB
Video BIOS version: 90.16.34.00.1d
IRQ: Not used
Bus: PCI Express x4 Gen3

i would suggest starting with some temperature monitoring, see what the cpu is doing through something like hwinfo or coretemp. maybe look at your drives too, one of them could be failing, look in task manager for high usage and try to surf around files on the drives, if one of them acts slower than usual, it could be a sign. if the temperatures look ok, i would double check that all your cables/connectors are fully seated, cleaning can knock stuff lose.

Might be the GPU going bad, i've seen a lot of 1000 series starting to finally fail recently. Can you recreate the freeze if you plug your video cable directly into your motherboard?

Check list

Check temps
Run isolated stress tests (GPU, memory, CPU, SSD)
uninstall-reinstall GPU drivers
disable any overclocks

If possible, try an alternative PSU.

Could always reinstall Windows to rule that out too.

Its a long shot since you are having to manually power down, but if it generated a crashdump you can use windbg to check either the memory.dmp file or the minidump files in minidump folder. You should be able to google how to use it. If a dump was generated it will tell you what caused the crash.