Crashing New World - i9 14900k, RTX 4090

I finally decided to bite the bullet and complete my Game PC with an upgrade to my tired 7 year old i7 6850k CPU. A year ago I did a simple upgrade from the 2x1080 GTX sli setup to a single the 4090 RTX, which breathed some much needed frames on my games, especially with DLSS 3.5. The only issue with the 6850k build was that CPU bound games like New World which has always been a bit temperamental didn't benefit from the 4090 upgrade.

So last week I took the plunge and went with the newly released i9 14900k with Asus ROG Strix Z790-H Gaming WIFI motherboard 64gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 Ram and a Samsung 990 pro M2. 2TB SSD.

The upgrade was fairly straight forward. The only minor issue was that my old PC configuration had hard acrylic water cooling pipework so they were all going to be wrong. This was not an issue though as I had some spare flexi pipes and connectors from a previous build.

After setting up the hardware, a fresh copy of windows playing around with the AI overclocking settings, some cinebench testing and 3D Mark benchmarking, I fired up New World and I was greeted with a solid frame rate over 200+fps. An absolute joy to play, especially after the 60fps I was having, which dived to 25fps in open world PvP and OPR.

However, after a couple of hours of play I was hit with my first crash. This happened live and I fired it up again, only to be met with a second and third crash. Initially I thought the AI Overclock was the issue so I went for a more steady CPU overclock. After a few hours of testing I was still hit with the same issue. So I rolled the CPU back to stock settings and no XMP. Again the game was crashing. I spent a solid evening learning about the new way to overclock with P cores and E Cores and my old CPU didn’t have these. (for reference this is the guide I used here)

After an evening of CPU testing and optimizing I was beginning to think it could be GPU related. So I installed the monitoring and overclocking Zotac Firestorm software that came with my GPU and ran the game.

Again more crashing.

However I was hit by more frequent crashing. Despite this being frustrating I think I’m getting close to the cause of the issue as the software put the card in performance mode. So instead of CPU related issues I’ve now been searching for GPU ones.

After hours of research and crawling through posts and the standard updating drivers, removing overclocks, reinstalling the game, reinstalling windows etc I found a few posts that found New World can create huge power draws up to 450w, on the GPU which can result in crashing. I currently have an RM 1000 Corsair PSU which should be adequate but it may be struggling with the peak power demands.

My plan tonight is to underclock my 4090 RTX GPU while running the i914900k at stock to try and reduce the power spikes and see if that stabilizes the game. I’ve also bought a newer PSU, Corsair HXi Series HX1500i which should give me a bit more power headroom, which I’ll install tomorrow night. I actually need a second power supply to run the old motherboard and CPU as I want to build a PC for the boys so I may as well upgrade mine and give them the old build.

I’ll come back to you with the testing and results and hopefully this will allow me to start streaming again.