Question 100% Drive usage during gameplay causing freeze

insanelyorange

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Hello,
Recently I upgraded from an old intel cpu to a new AMD 5600x and have been having some issues.
During gameplay, I will have spikes in usage on my OS drive and occasionally my game drive usage causing audio turning robotic and freezes. Worst case, after an hour or more of gameplay the game will completely freeze and drive usage for my OS and game drive will spike to 100% and keep me from alt tabbing or alt-f4ing. I can see programs functioning on my second monitor losing internet but my inputs do nothing, I have to hard reset the PC. Usually, it takes a couple boots for me to see the windows splash screen and boot into my OS. The only brand new hardware is a new motherboard , CPU and case everything else is several years old.

I read around online and tried several fixes for 100% disk usage causing freezing. Such as: Running chkdsk, changing sata cables and where they're plugged in, disabling telemetry and testing my ram.
The only two possible causes I have is:

  1. When doing a fresh install of windows, it wouldn't install on my main OS drive but after changing which usb slot my usb drive was plugged into it worked.
  2. On my motherboard for CPU power there's an 8pin power plug and a separate 4pin power plug. I only have power running to the 8pin as I lost my spare CPU power cables for my current PSU. During these freezes I monitored my power draw with HWmonitor and couldn't see any significant power draw leading to these freezes.
As I think this issue was happening before doing a fresh install of windows I'm worried it could be a motherboard issue.
I have a new PSU coming in the mail as 550w is pretty close to the money on power consumption and I want to have all the power plugins for my cpu; along with new ram.
BIOS came to me with 1.50 installed on it, so I didn't have to flash it to install my new CPU.

I've also been starting to record system performance with Windows Performance Recorder and can provide it when asked.

Specs:
CPU: AMD 5600x
Mobo: ASROCK B550m Steel legend BIOS 1.50
Ram: HyperX Fury @2133 (8GB x 2)
GPU: RTX 2070 Super
PSU: EVGA Supernova G2 550w
OS SSD: Adata SP550 500GB
Game SSD: Samsung 860 EVO 1TB

DXDIAG: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PtNqYWmKFNm6qRyg9ZkxUJp7sb21G6-U/view?usp=sharing


EDIT: Fixed my issue via flashing my bios to 1.52 and reinstalling windows on a different SSD
 
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insanelyorange

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New Crucial Ballistix Ram came in and was able to put it to it's advertised speeds of 3600mhz but the problem still persists, so it's defiantly not a ram issue.
Also tried turning off windows defender and malware bytes, didn't work.

Anyone out there with any ideas?
 
After a windows install you do the following in this order?

  • Do all your windows update
  • Install board chipset drivers (B550 chipset drivers from AMD's website)
  • Install GPU drivers
  • Install Audio/Lan drivers (optional)
There is 1 more BIOS update for your board. Might want to flash it to the latest. Could be optimization for Ryzen 5000 CPU's.

You don't need that extra 4 pin for the CPU power. It's for extreme overclocking.

How full is that OS SSD?

Ram: HyperX Fury @2133 (8GB x 2)???
Your Ram at 2133MHz is way too slow for your Ryzen 5600X. Should have at least 3200MHz RAM to 3600MHz RAM. You kept your Intel RAM you had. You will need better RAM for that Ryzen system.
 
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insanelyorange

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After a windows install you do the following in this order?

  • Do all your windows update
  • Install board chipset drivers (B550 chipset drivers from AMD's website)
  • Install GPU drivers
  • Install Audio/Lan drivers (optional)
There is 2 more BIOS update for your board. Might want to flash it to the latest. Could be optimization for Ryzen 5000 CPU's.

You don't need that extra 4 pin for the CPU power. It's for extreme overclocking.

How full is that OS SSD?

Ram: HyperX Fury @2133 (8GB x 2)???
Your Ram at 2133MHz is way too slow for your Ryzen 5600X. Should have at least 3200MHz RAM to 3600MHz RAM. You kept your Intel RAM you had. You will need better RAM for that Ryzen system.


Yes, windows was updated and I installed the top 4 drivers for my motherboard from ASROCKs website: Realtek audio, AMD chipset, Realtek Lan and AMD RAIDXpert. GPU drivers were installed afterwards.
There's only one more bios version above mine, 1.52 but I'll give that a shot. The OS SSD is nowhere near full, only 54GB out of 447GB is in use. I'm also going to attempt a clean install on my "Game SSD" and see if that'll fix anything.
 
Yeah you are right I'm sorry there is 1 BIOS version above the one you have.

You did not need AMD RAIDXpert and unless AMD's chipset drivers are older than the one on the motherboard's website I would recommend you install the one from AMD - https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-socket-am4/b550

The version on AMD is 2.10.13.408.
The version on board website is - 2.04.09.131.

Install the AMD chipset drivers from AMD's website instead.

I have no idea if RAIDXpert drivers can cause issues like you have but I will let people who knows this answer you. You're not using any RAID.
 

insanelyorange

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Yeah you are right I'm sorry there is 1 BIOS version above the one you have.

You did not need AMD RAIDXpert and unless AMD's chipset drivers are older than the one on the motherboard's website I would recommend you install the one from AMD - https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-socket-am4/b550

The version on AMD is 2.10.13.408.
The version on board website is - 2.04.09.131.

Install the AMD chipset drivers from AMD's website instead.

I have no idea if RAIDXpert drivers can cause issues like you have but I will let people who knows this answer you. You're not using any RAID.

Understood, I'll update my chipset drivers to the one on the AMD website and I'll uninstall RAIDxpert since I don't need it anyway.
I appreciate your help, I'll report back after I see the results from my clean install and bios flash.
 

insanelyorange

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Well, it appears the issue has been resolved. After reinstalling windows on my other SSD and flashing my bios I haven't had a freeze thus far, only two instances of the audio being briefly robotic.
 

insanelyorange

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It seems the issue still persists. Today, I had frequent robotic audio during gameplay and an eventual freeze.

Here's a picture of my task manager and resource monitor during a point when my audio was being robotic.
Lvr6nwv.png


It seems System processing spiking in disk usage cause this strange behaviour