so there is no goddamn way my system is responsible for the crashes
I get your frustration, I really do ... but think about that statement for a moment. If your system wasn't part of the problem *in some way* the game would constantly be crashing for hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of people.
When I take my personal example, I am still convinced there *was* something going on with the game - highly unlikely that it was coincidence that BG3/its launcher started to crash my system right after a certain patch had come out when the PC was running smoothly (AFAIK) before that. I say "AFAIK" because things might have been crashing in the background before that without me even noticing it - I wasn't paying that close attention to things before the rig started to freeze up all the time. And just because you don't freeze up/BSoD doesn't mean your PC is running trouble free all the time.
Before those crashes started, the PC seemed stable to me ... it ran OCing stress-tests just fine (3D Mark 40 min stress-tests, Cinebench, etc) and it never crashed while playing other games. In fact, I'm very sure it never ever BSoD-ed on me or froze up before I installed BG3 and its late August update.
What it came down for me was, at first, updating everything I could think of and getting rid of a ton of bloatware (as elaborated in this thread already), then checking what exactly was crashing at what time (using Win Event-Log and Reliability Report). Plus regular runs of Windows System File Check after crashes to find and repair faults in the OS-installation-folder. Once I had eliminated the Larian Launcher by disabling it "for good", things seemed to smooth out, but then other apps started to crash the PC while BG3 was running. Which could've just been coincidence because this PC has been running nothing but BG3 after a certain time of day, every day since I bought the game in late August.
After the Launcher was out of the picture, it was things like MS Teams Updater that showed up in the error logs over and over - so I threw MS Teams off my PC - I don't use it and I don't even know how it got installed in the first place, lol. Then things smoothed out once more until about 10 days ago when I started to suffer Windows Explorer crashes. And those happened, at times, right after start-up, on the Windows Log-In screen... so there wasn't even time for me to start up BG3 (or any other app) and the game couldn't have been directly responsible.
I've put out a lot of cries for help on dedicated OS/Win boards and while I didn't get a definitive answer, the *consensus* seemed to be that all this might have something to do with my RAM and that BG3 wasn't the cause but the trigger of/for these problems. Which kinda makes sense to me, since I don't play any other super current AAA-titles besides BG3, so even though I do stuff like DCS and IL-2 in VR, perhaps those titles never taxed the system like newer games like BG3 do. Besides: I haven't gotten around to doing much flying since BG3 is taking up all my gaming-hours...
In any case: I decided to look for the easy fix and to change my RAM configuration. I built this PC last year with 2x8 GB of Corsair CL 18 DDR4 3600, then I bought another identical (on paper) kit in early 2023 and now had all four DIMM-slots populated (4x8 GB). In both configs, I was running the RAM with XMP enabled, as you do. That's two or three potential sources of instability: OCed RAM, since XMP is just a standardized overclock, mixed and matched kits and all four slots populated. Looking into this, it didn't take long to find out that while both kits were "identical" (same product ID and all), their components came from two different manufacturers - plus they weren't in the board manufacturer's compatibility list (which doesn't need to mean a lot, but still) and mixing kits that aren't sold together as a single kit also is regarded as a bit of a no-no.
Then, just for $hits and giggles, I ran a crappy in-OS memtest (not much point to those, really) ... which crashed my PC after four minutes of testing. So I bit the bullet, bought 2x16 GB G.Skill Trident Z 3600 CL16 (a kit which *is* listed as compatible by my board's manufacturer) and now my PC has been running trouble free for a week or so. It's also a bit faster because I went from CL18 to CL16..
It's still too early to call this one "fixed" and so far, I've been too lazy to memtest86 the old Corsair sticks ... but I'm semi-convinced at this point that my old RAM (or probably rather my old RAM configuration) played a part here. I might not even find any faults with the old sticks, because memtest doesn't test for compatibility, and the fact that I mixed and matched (sort of) and had four DIMMs on the board alone could've been what was causing instability issues.
S.
