For the record: my HP Victus has a damaged cooling pipe, but it isn’t damaged to the point where it overheats my components.
My HP Victus has been having an issue with the GPU for the past 6 months. Running any semi-demanding games (STALKER GAMMA, War Thunder) caused my PC to do a hard restart. After applying new thermal paste and buying a cooling pad, the issue was far less common, but still happened from time to time.
About 3 months ago, the issue came back and nothing I tried stopped it from happening. It couldn’t even manage to run KSP on minimum settings.
However, sometimes it showed an error message before my PC turned off, describing an issue with AMD Adrenaline Edition/my drivers. I used DDU to wipe my drivers and installed a previous version, assuming that it was an issue with a new driver version. This was not the case.
This is important: MY PC RUNS FLAWLESSLY ON INTEGRATED GRAPHICS. Of course, they run significantly worse, but in terms of not causing my PC to restart? Flawless. Reviewing the thermal readings of my CPU when running DOOM Eternal (about 75-85C) leads me to believe that it is definitely not a thermal issue, despite my bent cooling pipe.
I noticed another thing: When using my GPU, the slightest bump caused a freeze, which was always a forerunner of my PC restarting.
I have no idea what is actually causing the issue. Please do not say that I must reinstall my drivers, I have done that every time my PC restarts, because for some reason it makes AMD Adrenaline Edition incompatible with my GPU.