Solved All games having crashing issues suddenly

Hi everyone, im hoping to get some insight on what the problem with my pc could be.
Here are my pc specs:
CPU: 13700kf
GPU: PNY XLR8 4090
RAM: G.Skill ddr5 6400mhz cl32
Mobo: MSI Z790 Tomahawk
PSU: Corsair RM1200 SHIFT
AIO: Arctic Liquid freezer II 360
SSD: Kingston kc2500 2tb, firecuda 2tb, western digital 2.5inch 500gb and a samsung 970 500gb where i have windows installed.
Monitor: Asus PG278 1440p 165hz as my main. Samsung 165hz 1080p (keeping it at 60hz..)monitor as 2nd and a 10 year old 60hz asus screen as the third.

So the issue goes: all the games i currently play have crashing issues (World of warcraft, Sea of thieves, PUBG, fifa23,battlefront 2, rocket league, world of warships and csgo)

- World of warcraft: I can be playing without issue all day when all of a sudden the game can start crashing on repeat for the next 10 minutes, giving me error #132 which is apparently a very broad error and can have many causes. And after the repeat crashing i could go on to play for few hours without issues and then it hits again and starts crashing.

-Sea of Thieves: Just random crashes when sailing the seas, ive had task manager open when these crashes happen and nothing has seemed out of the ordinary atleast to my knowledge, no extreme cpu usage or anything like that. It seemed to crash more often if i restarted Medal so i thought i'd keep medal closed and play without it but the crashes would still happen. No error code given on crashes either.

-PUBG: Pretty much the same as sea of thieves, ill be playing without issue and suddenly it just shuts down, temps are fine, task manager states nothing out of the ordinary and i get no error code either, just the "our engineers are looking into this" bla bla bla

-fifa23: This is a bad one, i havent been able to play it since december2022 as it will just shut itself down in any online match i play, no error code or anything. And the crashing seems to have escalated to the point where i cant even get to the main menu anymore, it just closes down when it enter fullscreen mode after clicking "play"

-Battlefront 2: this is ofcourse on the EA app too and it shared the exact same crashing pattern as Fifa23, randomly shuts down when in a game without error code but far less frequently but often enough to where the game was unplayable.

- Rocket league: Also random crashing, never in the main menu however, only when in matches and 0 error codes on this one

- World of Warships: Started happening recently where iirc it would give me some "fatal error" code and shutdown upon entering an online match, i would just relaunch the game, load in and it would crash again. And then it might work again for a few hours without issue.

-CSGO: had a crashing on launch problem, it gets to the "CSGO" text and then shut down. After i updated my BIOS i can now launch csgo but its kind of laggy before it gets to the menu of the game.


Few days ago i had a very odd thing happen, i had WoW open on the main screen along with firefox and youtube and some other tabs on the 2nd screen and discord on the 3rd with my buddy screensharing and then all of a sudden my CPU usage shoots to 100% and is stuck there which made my entire pc lag, freeze and barely function at all, audio went into static buzz mode and yeah, nothing really worked so i held the power button to turn my pc off, booted up fine and i continued playing again.

- These crashes started happening pretty recently and im not sure why, ive done a fresh reinstall of windows, downloaded malwarebytes and scanned my pc with the premium version incase i had a virus, PC is squeaky clean so its not that (i hope..) Also ran a Memtest and my ram passed the test with xmp profile keeping them at 6400mhz, benchmarked the gpu some months back and it did just perfectly fine, scoring comparatively to other 4090 cards.

The games do seem to crash more frequently if i tab into the 2nd screen (I run all games on windowed fullscreen) but this didnt use to be a problem, it just got pretty bad recently.

Its worth noting i changed my Mobo from a gigabyte to this msi since i suspected it might be the motherboard screwing me here but nah, also changed PSU from a 1000w corsair to this atx 3.0 one. Neither helped with any issue but atleast my gpu has way less coil whine (Yay?)..

So yeah im at the end of any ideas on what to do next here to try and get to the bottom of this, every page on the internet seems to just suggest updating drivers but i've already done that. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated

phillpower2 said:

Hello Idknomore,

Only thing that I am seeing there is an issue with the spec of RAM;

The RAM is not appropriate for your CPU, Intel state here up to 5600MHz and if you have XMP enabled the RAM will get auto OCd past what the CPU can handle and the PC will at some point fall over.

Go into the BIOS, disable XMP and then manually set the RAM to run at 5600MHz and the appropriate voltage.

You should also make sure that the Windows Power Plan is set to Balanced and not High Performance or Ryzen Balanced.

Something to keep in mind for the future, a CPU must be compatible with a MB whereas the RAM has to be compatible with both the CPU and the MB, this because a MB can be compatible with faster CPUs and MB manufacturers often state RAM speeds that far exceed what any CPU the board can handle.

Click to expand...

thank you for the reply, i cant believe i never noticed that but yeah it does indeed state on the website i bought my cpu from that it supports up to 5600.

My friend has virtually the same pc i do but he has a 12700k and the exact same ram as i do and he hasnt had any issues like i have and his cpu is rated even lower on the ddr5 support

Ofcourse, my bad.
I asked my friend if his indeed runs at 6400 and it does yeah. And to be honest these crashes were not happening before, they recently started (except any game on the EA app, thats always been crashing) which is why im so confused, power plan is at balanced.

All drivers are also updated. But the cpu stuck at 100% that happened 2 days ago is definitely the wildest bug/crash ive had so far

Thank you, ill get to it when i get home today.

I forgot to mention that when i had the gigabyte z790 my pc would crash about 1-3 times a month with some type of error message saying "bad oc profile, loading optimized defaults and rebooting" the only oc was the ram.

That crash has happened 1 time on this msi board and ive had this mobo a lil over a month now. I guess all things so far point to the xmp OC.

Okay so i limited my ram speed to 5600 cl36 about 2 days ago and PUBG did not suffer any crash when me and my friends played although we only played for about 2 hours which is what ive been normally able to play for without crashes (usually..) And i was able to play WoW without any issues these 2 days until just now.

World of warcraft just crashed 3 times within 20 minutes just like before with the crash message being the classic error #132
Fifa23 still crashes on launch, im gonna try disabling hyperthreading if that could somehow help with these crashes.

Alright disabling hyperthreading did not solve my fifa23 crashing issue.
I tried launching battlefront 2 which is also an EA game on the cursed EA App and it crashed 3 times in a row exactly like fifa with cpu usage hitting 100% on launch and then it would crash.

I managed to launch the game in a minimized window by not being tabbed into it which made the cpu usage only sit at about 50% which meant i was able to get into the game menu just fine, i changed the game to windowed fullscreen and actually played a game (shocker!).

I then closed the game, changed my monitor back to 144hz (I accidentally forgot to change it to 144 after i disabled 165 OC on the monitor settings) which led the game to launch in a partial screen meaning that only 1/4th of the game was on my screen, i managed to get into the settings again and i figured i'd try enabling DX12 if that would fix it, it did not.

And lo and behold we're back to crash on launch with cpu hitting 100% again! Except this time i cant try to launch the game in a minimized window since its technically already windowed fullscreen, so is this suddenly a DX12 issue?

Quick update:

Set my ram speed to 4800 which is the lowest i can go on this and i managed to launch both Battlefront 2 and Fifa23, however fifa still crashes without error though much later into a match but it 100% crashes regardless.

Battlefront 2 does the same, CPU usage spiked randomly to 100% and the game closed.

Really starting to think my cpu might be faulty.

Alright, i pulled the trigger and ordered a brand new cpu. same one ofcourse except this is the K version and not the KF.
And ive been using it for 2 days now and all the problems have disappeared, i have Hyperthreading on, all e-cores on and ram XMP enabled and no more crashing.

Really seems like my 'old' 13700KF was faulty, i RMA'd it and sent it back, it'll be interesting to see what they say.