[SOLVED] Friend's PC nearly same build as mine freezes/crashes when gaming ?

[Violentdawg]

My friend recently built a new PC and for some reason it runs like complete crap. In the game division with everything turned down he gets 100+ FPS yet it constantly freezes and sometimes crashes. Now it seems we have fixed the crashing issue some how (did pull ram and put back in, same with hard drive and gpu just to double check everything was in correctly. Have also went into bios and went in to set his ram speed to 3600mhz with no change. He ran a benchmark built into division twice, first time the cpu average was 105% second time 100% . Gpu first run average was 90% second run was 70%. He downloaded a benchmark test and his score was over 10,000. We have tried everything I can think of to figure out what's going on with this PC. Parts list below. I noticed right from the get-go his pc took a bit to boot up compared to mine as well but I also have windows on a M.2 NVMe. Any ideas/help is deeply appreciated!

Motherboard - B450 Tomahawk
CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6 core
Ram - G.Skill RipJaws V series 16GB (2 8GB) 28800 DDR4 3600
GPU - Zotac gaming GeForce GTX 1660 6GB
PSU - EVGA 600 BQ
Hard drives - Sandisk SSD 6GB/s and he has a WD 5400rpm (have tried switching games to SSD as well with no changes)
Windows 10 (downloaded straight from site).

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

By nearly, what parts is not the same as yours? What BIOS version is the motherboard on at the time of writing? What version of Windows 10 are you working with on his system? What slots are the sticks of ram populating on the motherboard? Speaking of motherboard, is this your motherboard or do you have the max version? Model for the Sandisk SSD? Checked to see if the SSD is pending any firmware updates?

 

[Violentdawg]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

By nearly, what parts is not the same as yours? What BIOS version is the motherboard on at the time of writing? What version of Windows 10 are you working with on his system? What slots are the sticks of ram populating on the motherboard? Speaking of motherboard, is this your motherboard or do you have the max version? Model for the Sandisk SSD? Checked to see if the SSD is pending any firmware updates?

I don't believe he's ever updated BIOS as he was afraid to mess MB up. As for Windows 10 it is up to date (he's had this PC for a couple months now). Ram is in slots 2-4. I'll have him check up on the SSD and HDD firmware updates but I believe he's made sure everything is updated including drivers other than BIOS. He went with a different MB than I did. My parts lists is below. Also When I done the benchmark with him in Division 2 my score was 5318, average results were gpu-85% cpu-41%. That's a crazy difference having the same items in that category. MB's are different, GPU is nearly the same other than mine is a super. I was starting to wonder if maybe his psu could be causing the issues.
Motherboard - ASUS AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus
CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Ram - G.Skill Ripjaws V series 16GB (2 8Gb)
GPU - EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Super
PSU - EVGA 850W
Hard drives - Samsung 970 SSD m.2, WD black 7200RPM

 

[MJS WARLORD]

Hi Violent , you have done a lot of benchmark testing but have you done any basic test testing to see how the pc is running .

1. run dxdiag
2. run memory test
3. check driver updates

4 . look in device manager for any yellow triangles that may indicate a hardware issue.
5 . look in window reliability monitor to see what error reports are logged.
6. check start up menu to see what gets launched at boot up , do you need the listed items running , i only have av and reatek audio running at start up.

 

[Violentdawg]

Hi Violent , you have done a lot of benchmark testing but have you done any basic test testing to see how the pc is running .

1. run dxdiag
2. run memory test
3. check driver updates

4 . look in device manager for any yellow triangles that may indicate a hardware issue.
5 . look in window reliability monitor to see what error reports are logged.
6. check start up menu to see what gets launched at boot up , do you need the listed items running , i only have av and reatek audio running at start up.

I'll try and meet up with him today and do this or try to walk him through it and get more info. I know he said when he looks under task manager he has a ton of running but everything under startup on disabled. He sai

 

[Violentdawg]

First off, sorry it's took me a bit to get back with you on this. Going through physical therapy from a car wreck (which is why I haven't been able to help my friend in person).
He done the BIOS update and did the tests in dxdiag, everything under those test came back no problems found and detected no errors. He is actually able to play games now but his fps still jumping around (could be in normal ranges due to gpu capabilities). He said the pc is inconsistant each time he plays and still stuttering. It hasn't crashed today since he updated BIOS. For instance he's can play Apex way better than Division 2 (far as I know apex has only crashed once other than that runs well). Also went through task manager and his list is the same as mine so everything there seems normal. I guess I should also state that he's running Division 2 at low settings until we get his problems figured out.

 

[DashingRiggs]

I think you should either reset the bios or reset the clock speeds back as that can cause lots of problems.

 

[Violentdawg]

I think you should either reset the bios or reset the clock speeds back as that can cause lots of problems.

His PC was real bad before the BIOS update. Do you by any chance know the steps on his MB to reset clock speeds and what speed he should set it too? I know he's not changed anything in BIOS other than when we noticed his pc was automatically running his ram at 3600 without doing anything, I've never seen a pc do that on it's own, I thought you had to go in on builds and tell the BIOS to set speed up.

 

[DashingRiggs]

Well I would just reset the bios settings, not the whole bios is what i meant. I dont know what else could have happened, almost seems like the ram isnt supported or something weird. Maybe 3600 is the ram limit on the mbo.

 

[DashingRiggs]

Resetting the bios settings wont reset the bios updates I am pretty sure.
I think if your mbo supports it, you can update the bios through hardline wifi I think (I dont know exactly how that works anyways but stating that may work aswell) Also make sure if you have the choice, as for the speeds, just keep them at clock unless you know exactly what to do, like i said it can mess up anything real bad if their set wrong. If you dont know the clock speeds, see if you can look them up.

 

[Violentdawg]

Resetting the bios settings wont reset the bios updates I am pretty sure.
I think if your mbo supports it, you can update the bios through hardline wifi I think (I dont know exactly how that works anyways but stating that may work aswell) Also make sure if you have the choice, as for the speeds, just keep them at clock unless you know exactly what to do, like i said it can mess up anything real bad if their set wrong. If you dont know the clock speeds, see if you can look them up.

So we have figured out with bios on regular ram speed settings it will not run it. So i got him to go back into BIOS and enable XMP to set his ram at 3600 and it runs it pretty good (still not as good as it should), but it's good enough he doesn't stutter and freeze. I'm wondering if he could have a bent pin in cpu or something. I've haven't had to do anything like this to mine.

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

To be honest I would do a complete reinstall of Windows as one of the first things to try to improve gaming performance on a less-technical person's machine. When you say there's a ton of stuff running in Task Manager my software issue senses start tingling.

If he was afraid to do BIOS updates is he also afraid to update Windows and update drivers? GPU drivers in particular make a huge difference and don't always auto-update.

Reinstall Windows, update absolutely every driver you can lay your hands on, it should be fine after that I bet.

 

[Violentdawg]

To be honest I would do a complete reinstall of Windows as one of the first things to try to improve gaming performance on a less-technical person's machine. When you say there's a ton of stuff running in Task Manager my software issue senses start tingling.

If he was afraid to do BIOS updates is he also afraid to update Windows and update drivers? GPU drivers in particular make a huge difference and don't always auto-update.

Reinstall Windows, update absolutely every driver you can lay your hands on, it should be fine after that I bet.

He was afraid to do a BIOS update because he had seen a lot of things saying if you lose power and so on during that update it would brick the board. Everything has been updated including BIOS and still the only way he can play is to have xmp on. My brother was able to go take a look at it and turns out his mother board is actually the B450 Tomahawk "Max 2". My brother believes the board is his issue. He was doing research on that board and it seems a lot of people using anything below the Ryzen 7 has had issues.

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

Ok well I’m not dismissing your brother’s “research” out of hand, but I would seriously consider that this may be a software issue and nuke all of the software on the PC, to be certain.

There is no motherboard that only performs well in games with a Ryzen 7, a Ryzen 5 six core chip is very much adequate for modern games at max settings. The GPU on the other hand is not. On a 1660 you should be targeting high or medium on all settings and running at 1080p. You haven’t mentioned what resolution your friend is running at and what resolution you are running at, that could be a huge difference.

I still think a reinstall of windows will help a lot.

oh, and restore all bios settings to default by removing the battery for 10 minutes.