Question Dead ram , CPU or mobo?

[Nick_1711]

So about half a year ago I built my current pc;
Cpu: Ryzen 9 7900x
Mobo: Asrock B650m Pg Riptide
Ram: 2x16 gskill trident z5 ddr5 6000
GPU: RTX 2060
PSU: gigabyte p1000gm

Everything purchased new except my 2yo GPU that I'll be upgrading when budget allows me to do so.

I was running it fine for a while, only "OC" was the ram speed profile to 6000 and it was stable since day one. It had a long 30s boot time, but other than that it was running smoothly till 2 weeks ago.

During light gaming (e.g. Hearthstone or MARVEL Snap) my whole PC would start "lagging", best way I can describe it is that it was getting super choppy, mouse pointer was moving fine but everything else in game/tabbing on desktop, or even task manager was like updating 1 frame every 5seconds. CPU/RAM usage was on normal % on diagnostics, no error messages, temps absolutely fine and sometimes it'd stop after I shut down the game on TM ,or it'd persist for a couple minutes and fix itself.

Drivers up to date and re-installed clean, nothing else really running other than steam discord and fan control, even uninstalled corsair's icue for my headset as it was causing me issues in the past. No malware, no viruses, no secret cryptominers, everything clean, I went ahead and formatted all drives anyways, installed bare minimum (drivers and couple games), but it didn't fix the issue.

Interestingly enough, it wouldn't happen on demanding games like Star Citizen where GPU and RAM usage would constantly be 80%-100% with CPU sitting on ~50%

I assumed it was GPU struggling as it's a few years old and it's been working overtime so I just assumed I'd have to get my new one sooner than later.

Fast forward to a few days ago my PC wouldn't boot at all, after multiple attempts waiting for ~30m, DRAM and CPU light on, so I just cleared CMOS, one ram stick, no gpu, booted fine and within 5 seconds. Re-seated GPU, one stick, still booting fine and super quick. Adding the second stick made it unable to post again. Stick 1 solo boots on any of the 4 ram slots. Stick 2 solo never boots on any slots. And any combo of Stick 1 and 2 doesn't boot at all.

Only spare components I have are my previous AM4 stuff so I can't really troubleshoot with other parts.

Considering my mobo has 4 ram slots and I initially got 2x16g sticks with the plan to getting 2 more down the line, if it is indeed a faulty ram stick I'll just go ahead and get 4 brand new sticks.

Before I go ahead with that purchase tho, anyone else has any other ideas/suggestions of what else I can check or what the issue could be?

Note, I haven't reseated my CPU since I planted my AIO on it on purchase, applied thermal paste properly etc, didn't screw the AIO down hardcore to bent anything on the mobo, but can I even exclude that as a possible cause of the issue? Either CPU memory controller freaking out or even mobo's ram slots getting damaged somehow?

Any advice would be appreciated before I spend the money on new RAM and then having to buy new cpu/mobo too or something like that, thank you


-Update: windows memory diagnostics show no issues, benchmarked CPU and GPU with userbenchmark without any issues , when it came to ram it underperformed but seemed to be only cause I don't run it with the OC profiles, but all my SSD drives were unable to be checked,like they didn't exist.


Ran chkdsk /f on my C drive and while I don't think it even found anything to repair, I haven't gotten the freezes today with the 3h of usage I could spare, tho second ramstick still seems to be dead

 

[Lutfij]

BIOS version for your motherboard at this moment of time? Your rams should be in slots A2 and B2. Make and model of your AIO? Might want to relieve some stress from the mount on the CPU socket/block and see if the issue persists.

PSU: gigabyte p1000gm
I'd have gotten something from Corsair instead of Gigabyte.

You stated recycling your older GPU, did you recycle your older OS drive without reinstalling the OS. Speaking of OS, what OS are you working with?

 

[Nick_1711]

BIOS version for your motherboard at this moment of time? Your rams should be in slots A2 and B2. Make and model of your AIO? Might want to relieve some stress from the mount on the CPU socket/block and see if the issue persists.

PSU: gigabyte p1000gm
I'd have gotten something from Corsair instead of Gigabyte.

You stated recycling your older GPU, did you recycle your older OS drive without reinstalling the OS. Speaking of OS, what OS are you working with?

I'm on windows 11, freshly installed at the time of the initial build, on my M2 SSD I carried over from my previous rig but it wasn't even a few months old,and it was properly formatted while carrying it over.

I'm running latest BIOS on my Mobo , can't remember it off the top of my head right now and I'm not home to check, but it's the most recent stable one, stuttering and issues started before the BIOS update though, on the version I've been running without any issues for months.

My rams were on a2 b2, just tested em on every slot and combo possible after the one stick seemed to have died.

Lastly,my aio is arctic liquid freezer II 360, mounted it with the proper am5 mounts etc

 

[SkyNetRising]

Stick 1 solo boots on any of the 4 ram slots.
Stick 2 solo never boots on any slots. And any combo of Stick 1 and 2 doesn't boot at all.
Any advice would be appreciated

Stick 2 bad.
Probably touched it inappropriately and it got fried with ESD.

 

[Nick_1711]

Stick 2 bad.
Probably touched it inappropriately and it got fried with ESD.

Haven't touched it or anything else inside the case for a couple of months tho, before the stick died.

Either way, I'm assuming it's dead,but since the whole laginess/choppiness issue persists on the one working stick, I'm assuming that either the pair was faulty or whatever caused one stick to die is about to kill the second one hanging on for dear life.

 

[helper800]

Haven't touched it or anything else inside the case for a couple of months tho, before the stick died.

Either way, I'm assuming it's dead,but since the whole laginess/choppiness issue persists on the one working stick, I'm assuming that either the pair was faulty or whatever caused one stick to die is about to kill the second one hanging on for dear life.

Do you run into the same problems with integrated graphics? Have you used DDU to get rid of the current driver to then manually update to the latest non-beta driver? Do you have VRM temperature readouts? Do you have any way to test components in another PC?

 

[Nick_1711]

Do you run into the same problems with integrated graphics? Have you used DDU to get rid of the current driver to then manually update to the latest non-beta driver? Do you have VRM temperature readouts? Do you have any way to test components in another PC?

Integrated graphics too, gpu or its drivers was my first thought but I did a clean install of everything, format included and it still happens.

Can't test on another PC as my 2 previous rigs are AM4.