Exploring the Interaction Between dwm.exe crashes and my NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti

For the past month odd my gaming PC has been acting weird. At first I thought it was a Monster Hunter World related issue, as that was when it kept happening, but then it started happening in other games, now it happens without a game even running and finally one of my two RAM sticks just flat out died. I still have warranty on everything so I am not really concerned about replacement costs and such and I am already in contact with the supplier.

The first issue

After a while of playing a game, initially only whilst playing Monster Hunter World, my monitors would shut down and no longer receive a signal. My PC was still running though. The fans were still spinning and the lights were still on. The only way to get back into the system was to restart the system, which if you’re like me and know close to nothing about Windows, because you’ve been on MacOS laptops since 2006 and only really used Windows for work since then, raises the question; how do I turn this off without killing the power? Thankfully pressing the power on button at the front of the tower actually doubles as a “shut down” button as well. Great! At least I can restart my system without any forceful power cutting solutions.

Once the system booted back up everything seemed normal. I’ve not been alerted of any issues, any crashes or anything at all for that matter. A one off glitch? Unfortunately not. This kept happening, usually after playing a Monster Hunter World for a while. Naturally the first thing that came to mind is that something is taxing my machine too hard, however checking the task manager neither my CPU, GPU nor my RAM exceeded their thresholds and in the case of GPU and CPU, temperatures weren’t very high either. So I just keep living with it for the time being. Then it started happening in other games too though, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8 and more. That’s when I started researching the issue.

The “cause”

I quickly found out that this issue seems to be heavily tied to NVIDIA GPUs and in all price ranges. I have an RTX 3090 Ti, but I’ve seen GTX 1070 users all the way up to RTX 4090 report the exact same problems. Gaming > Monitors lose signal > PC stays on > Have to shut down or restart with a physical button to get back into the system. After checking the event viewer I could see that in every single error instance, it was dwm.exe that would crash. So with that knowledge in mind and going through each and every thread I could find, with the oldest threads, that still described my issues quite accurately, being over four years old.

I’ve then gone ahead and pretty much tried every proposed solution that I could find (with two exceptions).

• All cables (front, back, inside the case, at the power supply) were disconnected and reconnected.
• I have cleaned the case and all components of dust. However, I only used a cloth and a Swiffer Duster; I did not use a vacuum cleaner or cans of air.
• GPU and RAM were removed and reseated.
• ‘Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling’ was disabled.
• Execution of an NVIDIA Driver Rollback.
• DDU in safe mode to clean all graphics drivers and do a clean install
• Various graphics settings, including Windowed, Fullscreen, Borderless, and FPS limits, change nothing, as the problem also occurs at the lowest settings.
• Not even joking; 720p30 or 4k144 didn’t make any difference at all
• CPU and PSU were only unplugged but not removed (as I have too little knowledge about them).
• I have made no changes in the BIOS (as I also have too little knowledge about it).
• I’ve also completely wiped my M2 drive and reinstalled windows 11

None of the changes did anything at all. However, since my PC was still on and steam was running, I decided to go in with Steam Link to see if Windows is still running, or if that also had crashed. To my surprise, Windows was still running “fine”, but at 640×480. According to the system my NVIDIA graphics card was not found. Hence why the monitors shut off.

Looking through the window on my tower, the fans on my 3090 Ti didn’t spin, which would suggest it’s either not getting power, isn’t seated correctly or at the very least just isn’t recognised. I know the first two are out of the question, as I have a 1200w PSU installed and I’ve already reseated the card twice, checked all the cables and none of it seems to be an issue. That the card isn’t getting recognised also didn’t seem correct, as I could still find the card in the device manager, I just couldn’t interact with it.

So the only things I know so far are that dwm.exe crashes for some reason and when it does my GPU will be booted off the system. Again, after restarting the machine, I wouldn’t receive any prompts or error messages after booting up that could impart some insight into this issue.

A RAM stick died

I have two 16GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4-3200 sticks and during all of my testing, one of them simply bit the dust. If it had happened immediately after taking them out and putting them back in, I would have put the blame on me, however it had been at least 20 reboots and three days since the last time I even touched them. The annoying thing about RAM sticks is, that as a novice there really isn’t much beyond testing if a RAM stick works or not. There is no further troubleshooting than that. So yeah I have no idea what happened here or why.

Interaction with MIFCOM support

MIFCOM is the company I’ve bought my machine from. It’s a convenient “build your own machine” kind of service, where you select the case, parts, extras and so that you want via their configurator, they’ll build it for you and send it out. I mainly read positives about them and my interactions with them had been positive up to this point.

As luck would have it, my machine started acting up during a time where they would be the busiest. I suspect that it’s the same every year because parents will buy some random crap for their spawn and then run into issue as neither of them know how to work it. So after talking to support both via and on the phone I am still waiting to hear back from them after answering all of their questions. On the phone I was told that they are so heavily backed up, that I might have to wait a few days before I get another answer.

Current standing

As I am still waiting to hear back from support I am not sure exactly what I’ll have to do, but as everything is still fully covered under warranty, me not having tinkered with anything either. Overclocking, custom settings and so on, those are things that I wouldn’t touch, for the same reason I didn’t touch anything within the BIOS, as I simply have no understanding of it. From what it looks like though, especially as the RAM stick died as well now, I will probably want to send them the motherboard, the RAM sticks and the GPU and hopefully have this fixed sooner rather than later. My goal was to play as much Tekken 8 as possible before the Steam release of Granblue Fantasy Relink and then play through that, go back to Tekken 8 and Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising until FF7 Rebirth on PS5. Now it seems I don’t get to play anything until FF7 Rebirth.

I’ll update again once I get the necessary information from the support… until then, I am just gonna sit over here being bored. Oh, we have a cat now, just by the by. I won’t really be that bored I guess.