I’m not too experienced with hardware issues, so here’s what happened: I was playing Fortnite when my whole PC froze for a few minutes. I couldn’t use my keyboard or mouse at all, and even though it made that classic BSOD sound, I didn’t actually get a blue screen. I had to do a hard reset by holding the power button.
When I restarted, it seemed like my GPU had just vanished! I tried installing the drivers, but even after the install completed, it said that no drivers were installed. I reseated the GPU and examined it for any damage but didn’t see anything unusual. In Device Manager, it shows that my GPU is disabled with a message: “Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (code 43).” Also, HWinfo can’t read my GPU speeds and my task manager doesn’t even list it. I’m at a loss here. I’ve got an RTX 3060 Ti that I bought last November, and I don’t push my PC hard, so I really don’t get how this could’ve happened. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
2 Answers
Code 43 usually means there’s some hardware damage involved. Unfortunately, that might mean your GPU is cooked and could be beyond repair.
Have you tried completely uninstalling all your graphics drivers and then reinstalling them? Sometimes a bad installation can cause issues like that.
Yes, I did a full uninstall and then a clean install of both the latest and a previous version of the NVIDIA drivers. But both times, it still said I had no drivers installed after “completion”.
What could cause sudden hardware damage like that? Is there really no chance it can be fixed?