Question Faulty RAM sticks, motherboard or CPU Memory processor?

[OUTBURSTPAL]

Ok. Here it goes. Sit tight, it's a doozy. I'll try keep this short, but informative as possible. So, a few months ago, I built my dream $7000 watercooled gaming rig. Upon my first boot up, well, I should say "Boot Loop". Yep, I experienced a never ending boot loop. Would not post. My first thought? RAM. Tried 1 stick, No go. Tried in slots A1 and A2. No go. Slots A1 and B2, nope. But then, I tried slots B1 and B2. Bam. Booted up fine. My first thought was that it was simply either the RAM or motherboard. So I tried 2 old sticks of RAM that I knew worked. And guess what! Ta da, it started boot looping again. Because I can be extremely stupid sometimes, I just instantly drained it, and RMA'd that <removed> motherboard. And guess what! Just guess what! Upon the store I bought it from testing it, it worked completely fine with the RAM in slots A2 and B2. Wow! Nice $50 for shipping back spent well! So they sent it back and received it within a week. I then thought "Oh, must have been a faulty cable. Nope. I installed everything exactly how I had it when it wasn't working, and somehow started magically working. Yep! RAM in slots A2 and B2! Makes absolutely 0 sense right? After setting up a test bench, for a reason that I don't remember, I took out 1 of my RAM sticks, reinserted it in the same slot, and guess what, it started bot looping again. Great. So here it is, the big thing I could have done instead of wasting $50 to RMA the board. I simply reseated the CPU, and bam. No more boot loop. So this is when I came to the conclusion that reseating the CPU was the easy fix and that was gonna sort everything out and the system would be fine, well boy was I wrong. After building the system for the 2nd time, (with RAM in slots A2 and B2) I experienced a random shut down when I was idle. I then checked my power settings and realised it was set to sleep after 30 minuets of inactivity. That was a relieve, but the more I thought about it, I realised that I was not idle for that long, but I just left it in my freaky <removed> book and moved on. 2nd day: I experienced 1 random restart. Then I knew something was up, but just let it go. 3rd day: PC randomly froze and could only be fixed by a hard restart. 4th day: a couple of random freezes, and then 2 BSOD. First one was a memory managment BSOD, 2nd one was cache manager BSOD. 5th day: Upon booting up, after about a minuet it would just freeze, needing a restart, just to have the same thing again. So essentially, the system was unusable. After all this, I moved the stick in slot A2 into slot B1. So the RAM was in slots B1 and B2. After this, the system was fine, and I am in fact using it to write this now. I have not experienced a single issue since doing that (it's been about 2 or 3 weeks now). So yea, that's my story. I really hope I get some replies, I posted on LTT forums and didn't get a single response. I just want some advice on what you guys think the real issue is. I can live with single channel for now. Just want answers which is what I seem to be failing to get. Oh, I also forgot to mention that I ran a windows memory test and it said my RAM was fine. ANOTHER THING I FORGOT TO MENTION: On the 3rd day, I put my PC to sleep. I woke it up after about 3 hours, and then when it tried to boot up the motherboard had the error 55 meaning there is no RAM installed. I then unplugged the PSU cable, and plugged it back in. After that, that issue was gone, but then it started boot looping again. Yup. Just great. I then unplugged it AGAIN, plugged it back in and then it booted up fine. This only happened once, but i'd assume it would still be happening if I left the RAM in slots A2 and B2.

SPECS:
Asrock z490 Aqua Motherboard
CPU: I9 10850k
RAM: Team Create 64gb (2x 32 gb 3200mhz)
(these are the only necessary specs to list)

Thank you guys so much in advanced, and thank you for reading this long paragraph.

-Chris

<language removed by moderator - G-Unit1111>

 

[g-unit1111]

For an initial diagnosis, most boot loop problems are connected to either faulty RAM modules or a bad power supply. Knowing the specific make and model of your PSU would help in pointing out what the problem is.

If you already RMA'd the motherboard and started over fresh, I would be tempted to say that the motherboard isn't the problem, especially if you have already POST'd and got it to boot successfully. Because a boot loop problem associated with a faulty motherboard is usually associated with something that could have been bent or broken during the installation process (and if that's the case, you won't be able to RMA it). If I were to guess, most likely the culprit is the PSU.

What are your full system specs? Knowing everything that is in your system would help, and the more details, the better. Also the exact codes of any error messages you get.

 

[OUTBURSTPAL]

Hey mate, thanks for you reply. The PSU is the Corsair RM850, GPU is the Aorus RTX 3090 Waterforce WB, and 2x Samsung 970 evo plus nvme m.2 SSDs. And I am using some cable extensions from cablemod.

 

[OUTBURSTPAL]

I’m just extremely curious as to why reseating the CPU half fixed the problem

 

[OUTBURSTPAL]

oh good god, I don’t know how I forgot to mention this aswell. Since I didn’t have a spare PSU laying around, I actually took the system to a PC repair shop and asked them to test another psu on it. They supposedly did, and the boot loop still happened (this was when I first built it). Although, they never reseated the CPU because they wanted to charge me $90 “to remove the water cooling” even though the only watercooled parts there were the empty cpu block and gpu. Scum I know. Anyway, this is what led me to believe it was the motherboard. If they even really did test it with another PSU, that probably isn’t the issue since it supposedly did the same thing.

 

[Mr.Spock]

boot loops are often memory related, but debugging them is often time-consuming often you have to clear CMOS and reset to default before proceeding.
and because the RAM is unstable updating bios or installing Windows doesn't result in a stable system. Simply reseating RAM or CPU results in the bios detecting a change and doing a partial reset and trying to calculating new "optimized" timings - these may or not be ideal which is probably the reason you have periodic success. Best to reset bios to default values and take notes of your changes between changes. doubt that the 64GB Team is on a published QVL list so it's entirely possible it's not 100% stable with your mobo so XMP is not guaranteed.

 

[OUTBURSTPAL]

I already reset BIOS and CMOS, just had the same issues. So this didn't fix it. Although I am very interested in what you said here

doubt that the 64GB Team is on a published QVL list so it's entirely possible it's not 100% stable with your mobo so XMP is not guaranteed.

Can you please tell me more?

 

[OUTBURSTPAL]

boot loops are often memory related, but debugging them is often time-consuming often you have to clear CMOS and reset to default before proceeding.
and because the RAM is unstable updating bios or installing Windows doesn't result in a stable system. Simply reseating RAM or CPU results in the bios detecting a change and doing a partial reset and trying to calculating new "optimized" timings - these may or not be ideal which is probably the reason you have periodic success. Best to reset bios to default values and take notes of your changes between changes. doubt that the 64GB Team is on a published QVL list so it's entirely possible it's not 100% stable with your mobo so XMP is not guaranteed.

You are actually right, my memory is not on the QVL for that mobo. Does this almost confirm that the RAM is the issue and is not stable on the mobo? I almost thought that, but then realised the other RAM sticks I tried that still caused the boot loop are on there. However, obviously i am not sure if that RAM would have caused the Freezing and BSOD issues if i used it.