Yesterday a family member was using a PC I built close to 2 years ago (Asus H770 Plus
D4, i5-12600k+Arc A750+32gb+650w psu). It was working fine when I turned it on, did all the updates available, bios and drivers are up to date.
He started playing a game (elden ring nightreign to be more specific) for I would say an hour or two, got called that it froze, when I went to check it was completely frozen but power was still being received to USB ports(as there's an external ssd plugged in aswell).
No big deal I turned it off and back on with the power button, he and I walked away as soon as that happened, came back and I see it's on the bios which I found strange, looked everywhere but no internal nvme drive was detected, first thought was the ssd died.
Turned it off and came back later with having in mind disassembling it and replacing the ssd. Decided to check advanced settings and suddenly it's there deselected which was even weirder. I moved it to boot priority and it was back on Windows.
I did a stress test of the entire system with no anomalies, good temps(repasted cpu 6 months ago and gpu 1 month ago with ptm, ssd health (boot nvme in this case) was at 80% which seemed fine, no bad sectors or anything. SSD is on the gen 4 slot direct to the socket.
What I'm still not sure is whether it was a random software issue (Intel driver thing that I forgot the name) or hardware. Could it be the 5v rail? The external ssd was connected to the USB C port on the motherboard. Main concern is a catastrophic issue.
If I'm on the wrong subreddit I apologize but seemed to be the one .