Hard crashing PC locks up

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I think I may have figured this out (at least for my rig)...

I'm thankful enough to have two PC's, one with a 5800x/RTX3080, the other with a 7700x/RTX4080. Both machines have the newest Windows 11 updates, NVME drives, etc (they are good machines, well tested over time).

The game runs like a dream on my 5800x/RTX3080 setup, have played for hours and hours with zero problems, no crashes ever... but I want to be able to play on the faster machine connected to a higher Hz monitor - unfortunately, this one is experiencing these dreaded "hard freezes" when loading zones. Happened 3-4 times before I started getting freaked out.

I spent a good deal of time monitoring temps on both machines after this. Both are low when playing. The 5800x maxes out around 75c when loading zones. The 7700x was pushing 90-93c (way higher than I have ever seen it). I began looking at the wattage of both as well, noticing that the 5800x ran much lower, and the spikes were far less severe than with the 7700x.

I had previously tried limiting the game performance with BES, turning off cores, changing all settings, etc. Nothing was working.

Then I remembered I put the 5800x in "Eco Mode" when I first set up the machine years ago (more stable overall), so I put the 7700x CPU into "Eco Mode" in the BIOS (going from 105 watt TDP to a lower 65 watt TDP)... The game runs like a dream now on the 7700x machine. Temps max around 80c loading into zones, no performance hit at all, and noticeable improvement in lowering random stuttering (the gears always turn smoothly, load times are quick, map loads in a second, etc). Best yet, no crashing (2 hours so far, but I feel confident).

I have multithreading on, DX12, Vsync off (manually set in Nvidia control panel to monitor Hz), and am not using any upscaling. The game runs like smooth butter now on both machines.

Some people may scoff at needing to do this, but the game clearly is taking too much advantage of the beefier CPUs, and I like the feeling of limiting the CPU itself for safety purposes, rather than doing it from the software side.

Hopefully this helps someone.

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Waiden#9514 wrote:

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Koppijn#6098 wrote:

Also experiencing similar issues here where the game crashes. Switching to Vulkan renderer fixed it for me for now.

I am running a AMD 9800x3d CPU & Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU.
Windows is on version 23H2 with optional Windows patch KB5041587 which contains the 24h2 optimizations for AMD.

For me it is pretty clear that Windows 23H2+KB5041587 or 24H2 puts you at risk for crashes if you use DX12 and have a specific hardware combination.

Hey! Any way to clean instal 23h2 without that specific update?