before I get to the details of my problem, I should probably make a few things clear
- Firstly, I am not a regular Blender user. I'm not completely new to Blender, but I don't have much experience with it either.
- I have already confirmed that this crash is not due to overheating, and is most likely not due to an overburdened PSU either.
- Blender is not the only context this crash occurs in, but it occurs much more consistently. The same exact crash occurs frequently when I'm playing Detroit: Become Human, but in no other applications.
Anyways, when I attempt to render a very simple material (A principled volume with no surface shader or other nodes), my whole system will crash, most often to a power-off state, although occasionally the computer remains powered on but displays a frozen image, with the only way to shut it down being through the AC supply switch in the PSU as the power button becomes unresponsive. All render settings are default, save for setting the render engine to Cycles. The crash typically occurs within a minute after entering viewport render mode, but has occurred immediately as well as two minutes following entering rendered mode. I have monitored GPU temperature when this occurs and it does not typically exceed 75C and remains well within safe temperature margins. I have owned my RTX 2060 for ~3-4 years (bought first-hand, not pre-owned) and it has functioned perfectly aside from this crash.
As far as remedial and diagnostic measures go, I have repeatedly tried reinstalling my GPU drivers, and I have downgraded them repeatedly (I am currently using drivers from 03/2020, but I have tried the latest drivers, both Game Ready and Studio versions). I have, according to instructions from NVidia support, launched windows in a 'Clean boot' mode to no avail. According to WinDbg analysis of the system memory.dmp file, every time this crash has occured a 'PFN_LIST_CORRUPT' exception has occured. For the record, there has never been a BSOD or other error screen displayed.
System Specs: Ryzen 7 2700x RTX 2060 16GB 2400MHz RAM ROG Strix x370-I Motherboard (don't question it) 550W Corsair PSU I have gone to this community for support as it is likely to be far larger than the Detroit: Become Human community and thus more knowledgeable. Any help would very much be appreciated.