My Predator PC (Orion 3000) Is Bugging the screen often freezes while playing games

cruzcairns

I have a Predator Orion 3000 gaming pc that I bought about less than a year ago, but for the past 3 months the screen often freezes and the games I'm playing crash. The CPU temperature is also around 60 degrees when idle, and I'm sure thats not normal. Anyway I can diagnose the issue to find a resolve, or anyone have an issue like this? Because I'm so fed up with it at this point.

[Edited the thread to add issue detail]

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/689607/predator-orion-3000-model-po3-630-freezing

Just to explain it to you in more details, sorry if this is too long but you have to realiase as a user you have to setup the software pre usage properly, and you have to have the adequate ram and hardware specs for what you are going to use your desktop for, as if its not and you play high end games or use high end software, no matter what you do your hardware will be buggy, freezing your Predator Orion 3000 - PO3-630 desktop.

If your PO3-630 is less than 12 months old then its under the Acer 12 months warranty, so don't do anything to this desktop's hardware and/or fit any CPU coolers or modify this desktop what so ever, take this desktop or send it back to Acer in your country and get Acer support to fix these temps and freezing issues with your desktop as there could be hardware problems with the gpu and its firmware, its ram or mainboard features that that are causing these issues. Get Acer to update the firmware to version v1.02 that was released 2023/01/18 and this desktops bios to version R01-A4 released 2022/03/22, as if you do a bios or firmware update you need to know what you are doing, as making any mistakes will brick your desktop, so be aware of this from the start.

You can do certain things to try and fix these freezing problems, its up to you? But my advice is for you to send your new desktop back to Acer support as its under warranty, but if you still want to try and fix these freezing problems, all you can do is to uninstall the NVidia graphics drivers completely and the Intel graphics drivers (if your CPU version has the integrated graphics?) as the PO3-630 came with CPUs with integrated graphics like the i9-11900, i7 11700 or the i5-11400 Intel CPUs and the CPOUs without integrated graphics like the version i9 11900F, i7-11700F and the i5-11400F, so you need to do a "Clean Install" of all these graphics drivers and with the Intel drivers update all the other Intel appropriate drivers for your desktop also to their latest versions.

Then Install the NVidia Game Ready driver for your GPU, install the NVidia GeForce Experience software and run your games under the ultimate NVidia settings that this software has and also set these games in the NVidia Control Panel under Program Setting > Select a program to customize (which is the games or a high end software that you have) > Select the preferred graphics processor for this program > set this to High-performance NVidia processor.

With the Intel drivers install the Intel® Driver & Support Assistant and do a scan of your system and update all Intel drivers to the latest that this scan shows, also make sure that you have all Windows Updates done for Win-11 OS! As keeping your desktop up to date and setup for gaming is essential for your games to operate properly and will stop the freezing issues that you have, with the cpu temps, a temperature of around 60c at idle is not high and its normal for these i9 and i7 and i5 11th Gen Intel cpu's. Also update the ram as for high end gaming you should have at least 32GB DDR4-3200MHz and a speedy PCIe 3x4 SSD drive like a Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe or a WD SN750 Black that has a gaming boost so that the M.2 drive works quicker under gaming, as all these mods should set your gaming desktop to play games properly, so try all the above and let us know, if it doesn't then send your PO3-630 back to Acer as its got some hardware issues. Good luck and hope this helps you out.

cruzcairns

How do I update BIOS?

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1220769#Comment_1220769

billsey

We really want to try and do some diagnosis if you want to get things back to normal without going through Acer warranty service. You say the CPU temperature is at 60C when idle? Where does it go when running the games? If it is below the middle 80s then likely the temperature isn't directly related to the freezing, if it's at or over 90C then you might be experiencing throttling due to the temperatures and the fix will be to clean dust from the system, repaste the thermal compound on the CPU and/or upgrade the cooling. Each one of those is a step in the right direction, though a lot of people just skip to the third since the others are handled at the same time.

Now, if your CPU temperatures aren't causing throttling then we should look to the processes running and the rest of the system. What type and size of drive is installed? IIRC some models of the PO3-630 still came with only a HDD. Those will get extremely slow whenever you are short on memory, so a memory upgrade might be in order. If you have an M.2 SSD installed instead, as most SKUs did, you can still get the issue, but it's less apparent because the drive is a fair amount faster. Still, swapping memory to disk is a big slowdown. Look at how much memory you are using when idle and how much that memory usage changes when running the games. If you have, for instance, 8GB of memory and you are using 6GB when idle you are very likely to swap out when running a game. If you have 32GB of memory and are using 6GB when idle it's not likely to be swapping…

cruzcairns

UPDATE:
I've recently noticed that it occurs exactly every 60 minutes, with hardly any variation, if there is its only a ever few seconds. What exactly is wrong? Since it's got to be a timed task possibly?

billsey

Open Task Scheduler and take a look at what is going on at one hour intervals…

cruzcairns

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1222179#Comment_1222179

Hey, sorry for the late reply
Theres nothing there as far as I can see

billsey

Task scheduler is what is normally used to launch a task at a specific interval, but it's always possible that something uses an internal scheduler. Try stopping third party apps and utilities or booting in safe mode to try and pin down what is causing it.