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.
That's a fun problem. Could be anything, could be even CPU cores being put into efficiency states.
General debugging steps, take the system completely apart. All the way apart. Reapply thermal paste put the CPU back on. Using only a single stick of memory. Turn the computer on with just the CPU and a cooler, maybe video card if you absolutely need it, see if you can replicate the issue. Since you mentioned booting was an issue, it probably is hardware. But to rule that software, try booting with the USB stick seeing if you can replicate the issue.
Keep adding parts back onto the system until you find where the problem starts