Since January this year, my PC has had a weird issue where it would most likely crash shortly after closing a game. This mainly happens with Assetto Corsa but it sometimes also happens with a handful of other games. Happened with The Crew Motorfest, Sonic Generations, even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Roblox once. Sometimes happens when rendering videos, too.

Specifically, the screen would freeze and one or all but one of my monitors would go black, and then after about 30 seconds I get a VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE.

The strange thing is that my PC runs games perfectly fine with no performance issues in them. It's only when I shut the game down that it decides to crash after patiently waiting for me to wrap up. VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE is usually caused by an overheating or overclocked GPU, but my GPU never goes above 70 Celsius and it was never overclocked. So even though I want to get a new PC soon anyway, I doubt that my graphics card is failing.

Specs:

• MSI RTX 2060 6GB
  
• Intel Core i7-6700K
  
• GIGABYTE Z170-X Gaming 5
  
• EVGA 650W

Here's what I tried:

• Updating NVIDIA drivers to current version
  
• Uninstalling software known to cause crashes (Reshade, Razer Cortex, and GIGABYTE App Center)
  
• Changing NVIDIA power management mode from "Optimal Power" to "Prefer maximum performance."
  
• Changing power plan from Ultimate/High Performance to Balanced
  
• Reinstalling drivers via DDU
  
• Using sfc /scannow
  
• Disabling my third monitor so that I only use two
  
• Have the game being the only program running

After researching the issue more, I found that VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE can also be caused by a failing power supply or power draw; not enough power is being sent to the GPU during the exit procedure and Windows freaks out, I guess.

When I went into my BIOS, I noticed that platform power management was disabled; after turning that on, the crashing after exit stopped, but they would come back if I woke my computer from sleep, so I had to do hard shut-downs instead.

Then I remembered the electrical issues in my house. Summer this year was particularly bad and we had multiple thunderstorms that caused power outages. There was a time where just using a blow dryer caused a power outage in half of the house, and it would take almost an hour to restore.

So I thought that if VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE could be caused by power draw and a failing PSU, it could also be caused by insufficient power reaching the computer. So I tried this by turning off my room's ceiling fan, and after multiple runs, my computer experienced no more crashes.

My question is, did I just solve a year-long problem by turning off a fan in my room??