Asrock Fatal1ty Motherboard x99x Killer Hangs/freezing

[nitzer40]

Been beating my head against this build now for like a week and my machine is still randomly rebooting and hanging. I’ve been an IT professional (Windows Server Admin) for 22 years who’s been building my own machines since the days of the Athlon 1.3GHz K7 processors. Never have I had this many issues getting a machine to work. I’m getting mostly random lockups of the machine (mouse stops and can’t ctrl-alt-del) and it’s not just when gaming. The machine will lockup solid just sitting at the login screen with no one logged in. I can reboot it, watch it come up to the login screen, and walk away for a few hours. When I come back it’s locked up solid. Only way to clear is by holding the power button down.

Parts in the build:

EVGA 120-G2-1000-VR 80 PLUS GOLD 1000W 10 yr Warranty Fully Modular Power Supply

EVGA GeForce GTX 960 02G-P4-2966-KR 2GB SSC GAMING w/ACX 2.0+, Whisper Silent Cooling Graphics Card

G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2400 (PC4 19200) Intel Z170 Platform / Intel X99 Platform

ASRock Fatal1ty Gaming Fatal1ty X99X Killer LGA 2011-v3 Intel X99 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core i7-5820K Haswell-E 6-Core 3.3 GHz LGA 2011-v3 140W Desktop Processor

Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO - CPU Cooler with 120 mm PWM Fan

LG Electronics 14x SATA Blu-ray Internal Rewriter

Corsair 900D Case with (11) 120mm fans (7 intake and 4 exhaust) and (1) 140mm exhaust fan

Tried multiple hard drives, mostly just SATA drives with no RAID

Basically I’ve updated the BIOS to the latest, downloaded all the latest drivers from ASRock, reseated the CPU/cooler, reseated my graphics card, reseated all the connectors, cleared the CMOS, reset the BIOS to factory defaults, tried to load both Windows 7 Pro (can run for 10 min or 3 hours before lockup) and Windows 10 Pro (only runs for 10min before locking up) on two different but identical hard drives, ran the Intel processor diags (ran without error), ran an offline memory diag (ran without error), and dropped the memory config down to 2 DIMMs. I currently have a third hard drive in the system running Windows 7 Pro made from a fresh load. It’s the only drive connected at the moment. Basically I’ve tried to load Windows on 3 different hard drives so I’ve pretty much ruled out a hard drive issue because the problem persists. I’ve also hard set the page file on the C:\ drive for twice my system memory and don’t let Windows manage it. I’ve also disabled Windows firewall and hibernation and sleep functions. No anti-virus software currently installed. I’m not overclocking it.

I’ve formatted and reloaded the OS from scratch more times than I can count. I’ve run SFC /scannow (comes back clean) and chkdsk on the C: drive (clean also). System logs are showing some USB 3.0 errors and an occasional hard drive controller error. A buddy from work is going to bring me one of his spare graphics cards so I can rule out a video problem. Once I get the card, I’m going to put it in and replace the memory in the machine with my other DIMMs that were pulled out for troubleshooting. Other than that, the only conclusion I can come to is that it’s a motherboard issue.

It wasn’t creating a memory dump at first, but lately it has been BSOD’ing as well as freezing. While I was trying to install the memory dump tools to read it, it crashed so I haven’t been able to read the dump.

Ideas?

 

[alexoiu]

"A buddy from work is going to bring me one of his spare graphics cards so I can rule out a video problem. Once I get the card, I’m going to put it in and replace the memory in the machine with my other DIMMs that were pulled out for troubleshooting. Other than that, the only conclusion I can come to is that it’s a motherboard issue."

Good idea. Try also testing different power supply, if available.

 

[MikeyZman]

Hey Nitzer, I am going through the same sort of thing, but my problem is if I just let the PC run it hangs. I'm wittling it down to late (Dec '15 or Jan '16) windows updates or software I've recently installed. I'll be sure to post when I figure my problem out. The good part for me is it just started around the first of the year, and is 100% repeatable so I can try fixes.

 

[nitzer40]

I RMA'd the motherboard. I got the new one installed and it's been up for 7 days now without a crash. When I installed the new motherboard with the old Window 10 Pro install (SATA traditional spinner drive), it crashed. Seeing that the machine had crashed so much, I'm chocking that up to the fact that the Windows 10 Pro load was corrupt from crashing so much. The Windows repair wasn't able to fix the issues in the OS. I then took my old Crucial M500 SSD out of my dead laptop, formatted it, and then reloaded Win 10 Pro on the SSD (loaded from USB flash drive to the SSD). Rather than load any drivers I actually kicked off a Windows Update since my Intel NIC had the drivers automatically loaded during the Windows load. Windows update on Win 10 picked up all of the devices on my system to include the chipset, USB, audio and graphics. I let it run for 2 days to check for crashes. It seemed stable so I downloaded the latest GeForce drivers and audio drivers. Been up and running stable ever since. I never loaded any of the drivers from the ASRock site. I might load the Intel RAID software since I'm looking at adding a bunch of drives to use as a data repository.