Random screen freezes + VIDEO_DXGKRNL_FATAL_ERROR on brand new machine

Hello everyone,

A month and a half ago I built a new machine. I fresh installed Win10 Enterprise 1909 and randomly and sporadically (sometimes once every 2 days, sometimes once every 2 weeks) the screen completely freezes. Sound keeps playing, but after a minute it stops responding.

It apparently BSODs because it logs minidumps with a VIDEO_DXGKRNL_FATAL_ERROR bugcheck, but it doesn't show on screen because it is frozen. The event log also shows the video driver crashing.

I also tried Win10 LTSC 1809, same issue.

Is it a hardware or software issue? Might it be the GPU, or motherboard (the PCIe slot or controller)? Or something else entirely?

I'm under a 6 month warranty for these components so I need guidance.

Components:
- Motherboard: ASRock B450 Pro4
- GPU: EVGA GeForce 1660 ti XC
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 2600
- PSU: Tested with EVGA BR 600w and Antec HCG 620w, same problem.

Log collector: KUREHA-(2019-12-22_16-56-44).zip - Google Drive
Relevant event log: events2.evtx - Google Drive
2 minidumps + watchdog dump: minidumps.zip - Google Drive

I lost previous dumps as I have fresh installed Windows several times. But I'm pretty sure the error is always the same. Note that these happened with NVIDIA driver 432.00 - I installed 441.66 today.

Please help.

- - - Updated - - -

Just wanted to post another watchdog dump I found:
WATCHDOG-20191221-1938.dmp - Google Drive

The bugchecks of the watchdog dumps are VIDEO_ENGINE_TIMEOUT_DETECTED (141) and VIDEO_TDR_TIMEOUT_DETECTED (117). It makes me think that the video card might be just freezing and the driver crashes as a result (hence the timeout), but I don't know much about these errors. Might it be the driver? The video card? The motherboard? I'm at a loss.

I also wanted to note that these are fully random and they have happened mostly at light load (ie web browsing), although the latest crash was when running an old game, so I don't know how to reproduce it.

Occurred again today (12/27) even with the new NVIDIA drivers (441.66) installed on 12/21.

15:37 - Screen freezes, mouse doesn't move, but music keeps playing and I can change the song with my keyboard shortcuts
15:37 - WATCHDOG crash dump gets saved.
15:37 - Event viewer: Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered. (Two times) Screen still frozen.
15:37 - Event viewer: The Desktop Window Manager process has exited. Faulting application name: dwm.exe
15:43 - System stops responding completely. BSOD? MINIDUMP crash dump gets saved.

Minidump + Watchdog dump + Windows events: minidumps3.zip - Google Drive
Full memory dump (600MB): MEMORY.DMP - Google Drive

Ztruker said:

Both dumps indicate a problem with your Nvidia card (EVGA GeForce 1660 ti XC) or driver. Since you already have the latest available driver, you can try uninstalling and reinstalling it as follows:

Remove and install latest Nvidia drivers:

Get the latest driver for your Nvidia card here: NVIDIA Driver Downloads
Completely uninstall the current Nvidia display drivers using Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) from WagnardMobile here: Official Download Here. Do this in Safe Mode.

Then do a custom install of only the Nvidia Graphics and PhysX driver.

See if that gets rid of the problem.

If not may be time to RMA the EVGA GeForce 1660 ti XC

Hi, I appreciate your reply. Indeed it does seem to me that the GPU is freezing up for some reason and the driver just times out trying to recover itself (hence the TDR timeout). I have tried reinstalling the drivers with DDU several times and have formatted and fresh installed Windows 5 times. I tried driver 432.00 and 441.66.

I doubt it's a RAM problem because the BSOD always points to the GPU, but I'm trying with a friend's RAM stick just in case.

I don't know if it's related, but before Windows 10 I tried Windows 7 and there I got BSODs pointing to pci.sys. I attributed it to Win7 just being old - but it might've been related to the GPU too... or the PCIe controller??