SOLVED: Cyberpunk 2077 froze/crashed my PC, blurted loud static from headphones

[TiedtoTheTea]

So I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 late into the evening and I went to sell some stuff at a vendor during Judy's quest to hunt down some scavvers who took . I stopped at the selling machine that was in Japantown on the way there, near her van, and then my whole PC froze and static greeted my eardrums.

Pretty startling, not to mention unnerving, to be honest...

This issue has been happening ever since I played Cyberpunk 2077, on not just CP2077 but other games as well...
Any idea wtf is happening? Is this SW or HW related, or possibly just CDPR broke the game somehow?

CPU: Intel i7-5820k
GPU: Nvidia RTX 3060
OS: Windows 10 Pro x64 21H2
PSU: EVGA 1300 watts
RAM: CrucialTech Ballistix DDR-4 / 64GB

Any help is appreciated, thanks

 

[Bartinga2077]

So I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 late into the evening and I went to sell some stuff at a vendor during Judy's quest to hunt down some scavvers who took . I stopped at the selling machine that was in Japantown on the way there, near her van, and then my whole PC froze and static greeted my eardrums.

Pretty startling, not to mention unnerving, to be honest...

This issue has been happening ever since I played Cyberpunk 2077, on not just CP2077 but other games as well...
Any idea wtf is happening? Is this SW or HW related, or possibly just CDPR broke the game somehow?

CPU: Intel i7-5820k
GPU: Nvidia RTX 3060
OS: Windows 10 Pro x64 21H2
PSU: EVGA 1300 watts
RAM: CrucialTech Ballistix DDR-4 / 64GB

Any help is appreciated, thanks

Experienced the same once, and the cause was a PC system completely blocked with dust, in combination with it sitting in a room that was too hot.

- Since it also happens with other games, have you checked that sufficient airflow is going through your system? Is the front panel clean of dust? And how about the fans?
- Is the air your system takes in not too hot?
- Are your graphics card drivers up to date?

Cyberpunk 2077 in particular pushes any system to the max, so it's vital that the system in use is sufficiently cooled, especially with those kind of high-end graphics cards.

Either that, or this:

PC Hotfix

A hotfix for Cyberpunk 2077 is out on PC. It addresses audio software-related crashes on game launch.

forums.cdprojektred.com

 

[blaze_2]

this is clearly a hardware issue. fingers crossed it's only overheating and not a hardware defect

 

[TiedtoTheTea]

this is clearly a hardware issue. fingers crossed it's only overheating and not a hardware defect

RTX 3060 seems to be a problem card among many...
Unfortunately, not much choice for me here given how expensive GPUs have gotten lately

 

[TiedtoTheTea]

Issue SOLVED!

The problem here was my RAM. The vanilla clock settings for it were too much and caused random freezing/crashing etc. After lowering the clock speed and turning on XMP everything is fine now!


All my problems I had before have completely stopped.

Thank you so much

 

[MartineDee]

Hm. I suggest looking even deeper than that.

RAM is a memory spender, and its functional stability should crash games/system.

The static sound from the audio card suggests a short somewhere. If your graphics card is using PCIe / Molex cable, unplug and re-plug both ends. Also, check for any loose metal parts touching PCBs (surfaces of any boards).

I had this erratic crashes + static thing going on when ... well, I honestly forgot if that was related, but I had the sound card power cable (Creative AE-9) only partially plugged into the PSU and that introduced all kinds of brokeness.

On another soundcard story, believe it or not, even such a perfectly shielded sound card started singing the coil whine through speakers! The root cause? The speaker wires were crossing with the GPU power cables. Separating them fixed the thing. So, technically it wasn't the card singing. The signal was distorted in the cable. I figured it out by also hearing the same whine at zero volume.

Also, on another PC story... recently I've dealt with a recurrently dying fan (a fine Noctua 140 mm). Guess what, its extension cable had two out of four pins bent way beyond usability. Dang. The cable was not meaningfully fixable sans cutting and such, but replacing it got the fan running.

 

[83427]

The problem here was my RAM.