Hi all! I am having a problem with my computer that I'm hoping someone can help me with. This is a custom built desktop PC that I built in March 2019. Upgraded a couple items along the way. The specs are:
I have NOT received any blue screens. Just freezing.
Here are the steps I've taken to troubleshoot so far:
This has been SO frustrating, because every step of the diagnosis takes hours. Literally been at this for a week. Hoping to get some thoughts from anyone who has experienced similar issues. Thanks in advance!
- ASUS Prime x470 Pro motherboard
- AMD Ryzen 2700x CPU, no overclock
- G Skill Tridentz Z RGB DDR4-3200 32GB (4 x 8 GB running at default 2133 MHz currently)
- MSI Geforce RTX 2060 Super
- OS Drive: Samsung 970 Pro 512 GB m.2 NVME SSD
- Drive 2: Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB
- Drive 3: Seagate FireCuda 2TB
- Drive 4: WD Black 2TB
- Corsair RM750x Power Supply
- NZXT H500i Case
- Windows 10 Professional
I have NOT received any blue screens. Just freezing.
Here are the steps I've taken to troubleshoot so far:
- Rule out OS issues by clean installing Windows 10. This was a complete reformat and reinstall of the main drive. No luck - the issue still happens.
- Move on to hardware. Starting with hard drives. Downloaded Seagate Seatools, scanned and tested all drives. Found that Drive 3 - the Seagate Firecuda - reported a FAIL status during the self diagnostic test. The program advised me to save my data and request a warranty exchange, or use the bootable USB software to attempt to fix bad sectors (I did not have luck with this - created the USB stick and I couldn't get it to boot whatever image was on there - no idea why). Backed up all data from the (presumably) failing drive, submitted a warranty claim with Seagate. The new drive is on the way and this drive has been physically disconnected.
- To test the memory, ran memtest86 with default settings (all tests, 4 passes). The first time I ran it it took about 7 hours and reported 2 errors during pass 3 of test 7.
- Ran multiple additional runs of memtest86 - no errors this time. I tried at least one test pass on two sticks of RAM at a time, trying to narrow down if a specific module is faulty but I have not been able to reproduce the errors that I saw the first time I ran it.
- I've also updated the motherboard BIOS to the latest version. Previously was running a very old version, probably whatever was available at the time I first built it. I don't think I've updated since.
- Finally - during this whole process, I realized my RAM is running at lower frequency that what it's capable of. It's at 2133 but could be 3200. So I did change my RAM configuration to load the XMPP profile to run it at this speed via the BIOS (ASUS calls this "D.O.C.P.") I have since reverted this change because I'm not sure if it was stable and I didn't want to introduce another variable - it seems like the freezes happen quicker when I'm running the memory at a higher speed but I haven't really been able to prove that yet.
- After all of this, I've been attempting to just let the computer run with only 2 sticks of memory installed at a time. And I'm still getting lockups regularly, with either set installed. It usually takes a few hours to happen, sometimes longer. The system will be partially responsive. I can minimize and expand windows, certain applications will respond, but things like task manager will be frozen and the more I click around the more messed up it gets until eventually everything is locked up. When this happens, I made sure to have task manager up, and NZXT CAM for hardware monitoring. Nothing looks abnormal, memory and CPU usage is normal, nothing useful in windows logs. This is making me think the RAM is not at fault, since it would be very unlikely that running with either set of 2 sticks would result in the same behavior (more than one bad stick)
- Also tried installing windows to the secondary SSD and running off of that. Still getting lockups, so I've ruled out the primary SSD as being the problem.
This has been SO frustrating, because every step of the diagnosis takes hours. Literally been at this for a week. Hoping to get some thoughts from anyone who has experienced similar issues. Thanks in advance!
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