I was playing a VR game, Half-Life:Alyx, and all of a sudden fans on the system started spinning and the system froze. The VR headset video was present but frozen and the monitor lost its video input. Because I had no control I held the power button to shut down the system.
 
After some time, I restarted the system. Running a System File check showed corrupted files that were corrected. Steam needed to be  re-authorize before I could play a game and the game I was playing was no longer installed. This part may have been due to the unexpected power down.
 
I have had the RTX 3090 for a couple of months and have played this game before with no ill effects. The game has good graphics but is not graphic intensive with light flashes/explosions and such which are more taxing to a GPU. When this happened, I was in a part of the game exploring a basement scene. There was a bug type creature attacking me which would electrify a room and shoot lightning bolts to injure the player.
 
So I was wondering, if a scene with quite a bit of extreme lightning effects could have overtaxed the 3090 and caused it to shut down or freeze. Maybe something related to a specific process, such as Ray Tracing? I do not know if it overheated but it hasn't done that in the two months I have had it, after I corrected the cooling airflow. The card will normally run in the 76°C- 78°C range during game play..
 
The card seems to have survived the encounter, so no current problems.. Running the latest Nvidia driver 461.40. Hard to know if a Win 10 update might have had any effect.
 
Thanks for reading..

Well, it just happened again in another part of the game involving the electrical creatures.  The fans went to full speed and the system locked up.  This time, even the power button would not shut it down, so I had to turn off the power supply..
 
I will not be able to play this game again until something is done regarding this situation..

Contact EVGA support. This sounds like the black screen and 100% fan speed issue other users have had.