Everything works - except for gaming. Please help me solve this mystery!

[ShinyMagpie]

Hello everyone!

I'm new here so please excuse any mistakes made. I'm having some very weird issues with my gaming PC. Let me explain:

My PC was built in 2015. It always worked, except that I sometimes had to install Windows updates multiple times and that, when I hadn't turned it on for a day, Chrome tabs or games would crash until I got a bluescreen, turned the PC off for a minute, turned it back on and everything worked like a charm again.

Now I moved and the strangest issues started:

> I was able to use the PC for browsing the web, but Chrome tabs often crashed
> I got bluescreens more often, until the PC started to crash without even showing a bluescreen
> I could play old or simple games (Assassin's Creed 2 or Stardew Valley for example) but when I tried to launch newer games (Borderlands 3, Fallout 76, Assassin's Creed Odyssey) the PC crashed again. Not in the menu of the game but only when I tried to load a save.

At first I thought it would be a software problem. I tried to reset Windows which didn't work out ("there was a problem trying to reset Windows"). I installed Windows again from scratch but that didn't change anything.
Meanwhile the crashes got even worse. Usually the PC booted, crashed right when I entered my password, booted up again, crashed and I was only able to log in at the third or fourth try. No bluescreen, just crashes.
Since installing Windows again didn't help I had a friend (who works in IT) check the hardware. He tried everything and couldn't find any issues. He installed Windows another time, updated my BIOS, installed all Windows updates and drivers and said it would work out again.

As far as I have checked surfing the web, listening to music or watching stuff works out better than before. I didn't have any crashes while doing that.
But now comes the weird part - whenever I try to launch one of the games I mentioned earlier the computer still crashes. I was able to play 3 minutes of Fallout yesterday before it crashed.

I have absolutely no idea what's wrong. I'd be very grateful if someone had any idea on how to help.

The bluescreens I had (when I still got them) were: System Thread Exception not Handled, Memory Management and Kernel Security Check Failure.

Please help me out, it would be much appreciated

[DaveLembke]

I'd use memtest86 and make sure your system RAM is completely healthy. You might be getting lucky in running smaller memory applications as they dont touch the upper memory address area where the problem is and when you get a game that uses the flawed memory address you then get crashes.

Other thing to do if it passes memtest86 is to download and run Passmark Benchmark and see what test causes the system to crash. If its when its doing the GPU testing then it could be a power supply that is borderline that is dropping out and reporting as a memory issue, however usually its a Kernel Power error when looking in Windows Event Log.