Why does my PC crash on stress tests but not while gaming?

Hi everyone, I’ve been having this issue with my PC recently. It crashes whenever I do anything that’s heavy on the CPU, like running a virtual machine on VMware. I decided to stress test my system to figure out what’s going on, and my CPU fails every test except Cinebench. I’ve tried OCCT and Prime95, but both crash when they hit CPU core #5. Temps don’t go above 73 degrees, it just sits there until it crashes.

I checked the Windows event log, and all it says is that my PC shut down unexpectedly—nothing helpful.

The weird thing is that I can still play games like Euro Truck Simulator 2 and Minecraft on max graphics without any issues. It’s just confusing.

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

  • Checked all power connections
  • Switched to a wall outlet
  • Disabled PBO
  • Disabled EXPO

Any advice would be really helpful. Thanks!

It sounds like a problem with core #5 if it always crashes there. Games don’t use all cores like VM tasks or stress tests do, so that’s probably why they’re fine. Could be a bad core or maybe an issue with power delivery. Try running the system with fewer cores by setting the affinity in Task Manager. If that works, you might need to RMA your CPU. It’s frustrating, but hardware issues happen sometimes.

@Caiden
Yeah, I think I’ll have to RMA it. It’s annoying since I only bought the CPU four months ago, and now it’s out of stock everywhere. By the way, it’s a 7800X3D.

This sounds like something I experienced with a Gen 13 Intel CPU—it would just cook itself and crash. I had a lot of issues, especially with games using Easy Anti-Cheat, though that was only part of the problem.

Was your system working fine at first and then started getting worse over time?

@Lilyharper
I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I’m running a 7800X3D with 32GB of 6000 MT/s Trident Z5 RAM on a Gigabyte B550 Gaming X AX V2 motherboard.

Try searching for solutions online—there’s a lot of info out there about PCs crashing during stress tests. Here’s a cleaned-up link that might help: Google Search.

@Caius
Thanks for the advice, but please remember to clean up your URLs before sharing. Long links can be hard to read.