I have been using this PC for about 2 months now when it randomly started having these hard freezes to the point where I would have to just power off and power it back on. Everything on the screen stays frozen and the audio cuts out entirely. The desktop stays powered on as normal. The only thing I have done recently was add a PCIe Wifi Adapter which I did have to remove the GPU for in order to get it seated. This was done 2 months ago though.
So far for troubleshooting:
Updated the BIOS
Updated the GPU Drivers
Checked drivers no warnings
Ran a hardware scan everything came back as pass
I purchased a new surge protector thinking it was a power issue
Ran DISM, CHKDSK, and SFC
Checked temperature which all looked normal
The issue isn't persistent so it is hard to troubleshoot. It happened three times last week then I started troubleshooting, I thought we had a fix but it froze up yesterday. The weird thing is when I am gaming it runs fine but when I am idle for a while then come back it will freeze. Ex. Yesterday I powered it on but let it run for like 3 hours, when I decided to join the discord it froze. Today I am going to reseat the GPU to ensure the connection is secure but I was wondering if anyone else had any experience with this problem and if so what did you do to fix it. This has been quite frustrating.
Specs:
i5-12400
Nvidia GeForce RT 3060
16GB DDR5