Question Black screen crashes randomly from idle to heavy workloads, stress tests passed

[terry.94]

Hi everyone,

I recently built my new SFF PC and as you do, I try to optimise it as much as possible for power efficiency.

Sadly, I've been getting many black screen crashes where the power switches off momentarily and reboot immediately after. This would happen idle when the PC just booted into windows, whilst launching a game, browsing the web, gaming and also OCCT/Cinebench/Heaven/memtest86 benchmarks. I did also get one BSOD with error message - System Service Exception.

One thing to note is that I did bring over my M.2 SSDs from my previous build which was an AMD system with a 5600X on an ASUS B550-XE mobo with a 3070 FE, but I did uninstall the old chipset drivers and installed the new ones.

The first thing I did was upgrade the ASUS X570-I to the latest version of the BIOS, I then turned on the XMP profile of 4000MHz CL16 @ 1.4V and this was when I started getting my first crashes. Then, I started to undervolt my 3080 FE to 1815MHz @ 806mV whilst benchmarking on Heaven and at this point, I didn't get any crashes until I tried to test some games and I would also get them in-between opening games. From my experience, I've never had a reboot from if an unstable GPU undervolt, only momentary black screen whilst GPU restarts.

After that I proceeded to undervolt my 5900X with a PBO negative offset of 30 on all cores and I immediately got a crash whilst doing the first multi-core stability test on Cinebench R23. I then did another multi-core + single core stability test, but this time it was all fine. I thought maybe the RAM was the culprit, so I ran memtest86 on a USB overnight and I would get countless crashes.

I began to think a negative offset of 30 on all cores maybe too much, so I did some OCCT benchmarks to test each core out and lowering offset on each core one by one, until I finally get all passes (I did get many crashes in-between including the one BSOD). After all this, I still got the occasional black screen crash.

At this point I was getting pretty frustrated. I've had stability issues with SFF builds before so I suspect maybe there is a power delivery issue with the mobo or PSU. So I downclocked the RAM to 3600MHz to 14-14-14-14-34 @ 1.45V and ran memtest86 through the night and got 9 passes with 0 errors, sure enough I thought this time I've solved it.

But no, since then I've still had 2 black screen crashes during lighter loads, so at this point I really don't know what the problem is.

Also very loud VRM fan noise from my mobo, which makes me think I have a bad board.

I've been in ongoing contact with AWD-IT where I got the motherboard from, about a replacement, they're asking me to change the fan curve of the VRM fan and send them a dump file (over 1GB).

Any help would be much appreciated.

So in summary, passed Heaven benchmark, passed Cinebench R23 multi and single core stability test, passed OCCT extreme CPU test, 9 passes on memtest86 (could be more, but I wanted to use my PC).

Current GPU/CPU/RAM settings -

• 3080 FE - 1815 MHz @ 806 mV
• 5900X - core 0 -25, core 1 -20, core 2 -20, core 3 -30, core 4 -20, core 5 -20, core 6 -20, core 7 -30, core 8 -30, core 9 -25, core 10 -25, core 11 -20
• RAM - 3600 MHz 14-14-14-14-34 @ 1.45V

Specs -

• AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
• Fractal Design Lumen S24 AIO
• ASUS ROG Strix X570-I
• Corsair Vengeance LPX (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-4000 CL16 Memory (CMK16GX4M2Z4000C16)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition
• Corsair SF750 W 80+ Platinum SFX Power Supply

 

[Phaaze88]

One thing to note is that I did bring over my M.2 SSDs from my previous build which was an AMD system with a 5600X on an ASUS B550-XE mobo with a 3070 FE, but I did uninstall the old chipset drivers and installed the new ones.

Reinstall Windows. A number of folks here would say you should rule this one out first, or you could be 'chasing issues forever'.

 

[terry.94]

Would the Windows 11 upgrade work? Or It has to be a complete fresh install?

 

[Phaaze88]

Fresh install. I wouldn't trust Windows to wipe itself thoroughly. It does miss berries sometimes.

 

[terry.94]

I'm planning to do a fresh Windows 11 install, but it's a headache backing up my data, plus there's also the worry that the motherboard could be the issue and I wanted to make sure everything is stable before fresh installing the OS

 

[Phaaze88]

I get that. But another wild card(one of the most annoying ones) was added to the mix the moment you carried over the old C drive, which contained info and registries from the previous hardware.
Sometimes Windows can clean off all the old stuff, sometimes it misses spots. Leaving it to the OS is taking a gamble that you may or may not win. Do it yourself for consistency.

 

[terry.94]

Finally got round to doing a fresh install. After formatting the drive, as windows 11 was installing, same black screen crash again, reformatted the drive and installation was successful second time. First time booting into windows, another crash. Then another during some windows updates. So at this point I just put the default settings in the bios to safely install some more drivers and updates first. After that, turned back on my custom settings on the bios, just did a 30 mins OCCT test, zero errors.

At this point, I'm pretty certain the GPU/CPU/RAM are fine, I feel like the PSU is fine as well because the crashes are mostly during light workloads. The most plausible explanation I have is either I have a bad mobo, a power delivery problem or that the negative offsets is not feeding the CPU enough power during light workloads?