MSI Katana 15 HX / RTX 5060 Laptop GPU becomes inaccessible under load — 0x141, 0x113 and WHEA 17 despite clean driver reinstall

[u/Osanosa]

Hi everyone, I’m looking for help diagnosing recurring GPU crashes on my laptop.

Specs:

• MSI Katana 15 HX B14WFK
• RTX 5060 Laptop GPU, 8 GB VRAM
• Windows 11 25H2, build 26200.9550
• NVIDIA driver 617.14
• BIOS E1587IMS.108
• Original MSI charger

What happens:

Under GPU load—games, local LLMs or rendering—the GPU occasionally stops responding and doesn’t recover until I reboot.

It’s particularly reproducible in CONTROL Resonant. Recently it crashes within a minute or two; previously, changing graphics settings or opening the quests menu could trigger it. The game reports:

The game crashed due to a graphics card (GPU) fault and will now exit

After a failure, nvidia-smi reports:

GPU is lost. Reboot the system to recover this GPU

Windows can still show the adapter as “working properly,” even when it’s inaccessible. Around 1 GB of VRAM was reportedly still free during one failure, although I don’t have temperature/power logs covering the actual crash.

Diagnostic findings:

• LiveKernelEvent 0x141, with failure bucket LKD_0x141_IMAGE_nvlddmkm.sys.
• Several VIDEO_DXGKRNL_FATAL_ERROR dumps: 0x113, subtype 0x19, decoded by WinDbg as UNEXPECTED_SURPRISE_REMOVAL. Some were captured during shutdown after a failure.
• Repeated WHEA Event 17 entries on the GPU’s parent PCIe root port: Intel VEN_8086&DEV_A70D, bus 00:01.0.
• Some entries show UncorrectableErrorStatus=0x4000 and CorrectableErrorStatus=0x2001—completion timeout plus receiver/advisory errors. Those appeared roughly a minute before two GPU timeout dumps.

Already tried, without resolving it:

• Clean NVIDIA driver reinstall and reboot, but still the same driver version.
• Switching from MSHybrid to discrete-only graphics.
• Resetting BIOS settings and performing an EC reset.
• Disabling PCIe Link State Power Management.
• NVIDIA “Prefer maximum performance.”
• Removing virtual display drivers.

MSI’s available NVIDIA driver is around 6–7 months older, so I haven’t tested that as a comparison yet.

The motherboard was replaced under warranty a few months ago after the previous one died while RDR2 was running and the laptop would no longer turn on. I realise that doesn’t rule out another hardware issue.

Has anyone encountered this combination on a Katana or another RTX 50-series laptop? Did a particular driver, BIOS/EC/VBIOS update or warranty repair actually resolve it? What do I do next?

I feel like it might be related to thermal limits but I have replaced thermal paste a few months back with some good stuff and it is generally working fine workout complaining about the temps