My system:
CPU: Ryzen 9 7950X
GPU: RX 7900XT
Motherboard: Gigabyte X670E Aorus Master
RAM: 2x (2x32GB DDR5 G.SKill Ripjaws S5 running at 3600 MHz)
cooler: Noctua NH-D15
Power supply: Corsair HX1000i
OS: Linux (mainly openSUSE recently)
nvme SSDs: 2x Samsung 980 Pro 2TB (CPU slots), 1x WD Black SN770 1 TB (chipset slot)
Sata drives: 2x Barracuda 8TB HDD, 1x Samsung 870 EVO 4TB
TLDR; BIOS update to F12/GPU change seemed to coincide with the introduction of IO and bluetooth ceasing to be recognized as available by the OS when using front/back IO. OS update seemed to make these issues far, far worse and introduced other issues with complete system freezes, wifi not being recognized by the OS at all, bluetooth constantly disconnecting and not being recognized by the OS at all. Reverting to BIOS F9 seems to make these somewhat better, but still present and there are now random system crashes. Installing a wifi card identical to what is internal to the board seems to have made things better, although not perfect and it is too soon to say this confidently. It's unclear whether the board should be RMA'ed. Prior to this update, I had been running this system (with the RTX 3060 Ti) since last October with no issues.
A recap of my week of troubleshooting:
I recently swapped out my RTX 3060 Ti for an RX 7900XT. This is where all the trouble began. No issues prior to this, except the (in hindsight) minor graphical glitches due to Nvidia drivers not playing well with some Linux apps. This is what motivated the swap. Boy I had no idea what I was trading those glitches for when I made the switch. Right off the bat I had issues with this card. In Fedora and Pop!_OS the clock speed didn't seem capable of going over 100 MHz. Naively, I thought "oh this card is newer than the F6 BIOS that the board is currently on, I'll update it to F12 and see if that fixes this." It did not fix it, but alas my machine was now on BIOS F12 and F6 was no longer on Gigabyte's site, so no going back now even though in hindsight that BIOS worked flawlessly for my system. This is when weird stuff started to happen. Reading and writing to external drives connected to the front and back USB ports would randomly cause bluetooth to stop working completely. Reading and writing to the 1TB nvme on the chipset slot could cause the system to freeze up completely. Sometimes USB ports stop working entirely. These would only be fixable by a cold reboot, where I shut off the machine, unplug it, plug it back in, then reboot. I had two files that seem to have gotten corrupted, although I cannot prove that this didn't happen before the BIOS update.
I begin to think that may for some reason or another (perhaps due to the BIOS update), the chipset must be too strained since the issues seem related to bluetooth and ports, particularly when doing a data transfer from an external drive connected to the front and back IO, so I remove the 1TB nvme drive in the chipset slot and try to do an IO stress test. I transfer 300GB of data from an nvme drive to an external SSD connected to the front USB-C port, then I transfer it back to make sure I've covered both read and write operations. Both work fine, so I go to sleep thinking I had solved this.
At this point I have Fedora 38 installed on one nvme and openSUSE on the other. I wake up yesterday and see that updates are available for Fedora, so I apply them in hopes it fixes the GPU issue. After the updates are applied and it reboots, the entire OS is completely unusable. The bluetooth mouse cursor is extremely laggy, the system can't go 2 minutes without freezing, wifi no longer works, bluetooth constantly stops working, ect. (and by "stopped working" I don't mean they simply disconnected. The OS no longer seems to recognize there being wifi and bluetooth available for use on the system.) Basically bricked. It's as if there's no wifi/bluetooth chip in the board at all. I then boot into openSUSE on the other nvme drive and see that there are available updates. Up until this point openSUSE had been rock solid for me. No GPU issues, no wifi/bluetooth issues. I did experience those IO issues, but at this point I thought removing the 1 tb chipset nvme drive had fixed this, so I apply the updates like an idiot. I boot back into openSUSE and it's now bricked just like Fedora. I tried applying the snapshot backups to openSUSE, but it did not help. I try doing fresh installs of Fedora, Fedora KDE, Debian 12, and openSUSE. They all now have this issue.
The next thing I try is reverting the BIOS to F9, newer than the F6 I was originally on, but the oldest BIOS available on the gigabyte website. At first this seemed to do the trick, then I got a full system crash.
I then think maybe I'll see if one of the 2TB 980 Pro SSDs is bad, so I remove them and add back in the 1TB WD Black drive that is at this point been wiped to the first CPU slot. I do a fresh install of Debian 12. There is a noticeable improvement, but still some issues with wifi and bluetooth disconnecting and random system freezes. I then try installing openSUSE. Similar lingering issues; bluetooth mouse is jittery, sometimes disconnects, and wifi doesn't seem to work at all. Downloading apps (~ 1 GB) can cause bluetooth to disappear. At this point I'm thinking clearly something is wrong with the board's bluetooth and wifi, so I order a wifi/bluetooth pcie expansion card.
Overnight, I run y-cruncher to stress test the memory to see if changing the BIOS introduced memory instability. I wake up to find it had crashed about 50 minutes into the test. I install the wifi card into the pcie x2 slot (no x1 slot on my board) and start y cruncher back up again. I let it run for about 3 hrs and there were no crashes. At this point an electrician was scheduled to come over (no electrical issues, just installing a whole home surge protector), so I had to shut off the computer. I resumed y cruncher and at time of writing it is a couple hours in and still no crashes, although the Bluetooth keyboard did disconnect during the stress test and I had to reconnect it- no complete bluetooth meltdowns as before. Bluetooth/wifi are still a little wonky but this could be due to there being two identical wifi chips in the system now and at least the system recognizes that some kind of wifi/bluetooth are present. Bluetooth mouse jitter is now gone completely. This is where I'm at now: system (so far) seems to work okay-ish with only 1 TB nvme in one of the two CPU slots, bluetooth and wifi are extremely unreliable without the installed wifi card which I believe should be identical to the wifi/bluetooth card built into the motherboard.
Sorry for the book. I really appreciate anyone who took the time to actually read it. I guess my question is this: What should I do now? Clearly the built-in bluetooth and wifi of the board is messed up to such an extent that it can cause the whole system to freeze up, which seems to have been brought on by some combination of BIOS/OS updates. Should I RMA the board? Should I try BIOSes F10 and F11? (especially if y-cruncher finds memory errors or it keeps crashing). Should Gigabyte be able to provide me with the F6 BIOS file if I contact them, even if it's no longer downloadable from their site? This was the last BIOS that I can confirm worked for me.
CPU: Ryzen 9 7950X
GPU: RX 7900XT
Motherboard: Gigabyte X670E Aorus Master
RAM: 2x (2x32GB DDR5 G.SKill Ripjaws S5 running at 3600 MHz)
cooler: Noctua NH-D15
Power supply: Corsair HX1000i
OS: Linux (mainly openSUSE recently)
nvme SSDs: 2x Samsung 980 Pro 2TB (CPU slots), 1x WD Black SN770 1 TB (chipset slot)
Sata drives: 2x Barracuda 8TB HDD, 1x Samsung 870 EVO 4TB
TLDR; BIOS update to F12/GPU change seemed to coincide with the introduction of IO and bluetooth ceasing to be recognized as available by the OS when using front/back IO. OS update seemed to make these issues far, far worse and introduced other issues with complete system freezes, wifi not being recognized by the OS at all, bluetooth constantly disconnecting and not being recognized by the OS at all. Reverting to BIOS F9 seems to make these somewhat better, but still present and there are now random system crashes. Installing a wifi card identical to what is internal to the board seems to have made things better, although not perfect and it is too soon to say this confidently. It's unclear whether the board should be RMA'ed. Prior to this update, I had been running this system (with the RTX 3060 Ti) since last October with no issues.
A recap of my week of troubleshooting:
I recently swapped out my RTX 3060 Ti for an RX 7900XT. This is where all the trouble began. No issues prior to this, except the (in hindsight) minor graphical glitches due to Nvidia drivers not playing well with some Linux apps. This is what motivated the swap. Boy I had no idea what I was trading those glitches for when I made the switch. Right off the bat I had issues with this card. In Fedora and Pop!_OS the clock speed didn't seem capable of going over 100 MHz. Naively, I thought "oh this card is newer than the F6 BIOS that the board is currently on, I'll update it to F12 and see if that fixes this." It did not fix it, but alas my machine was now on BIOS F12 and F6 was no longer on Gigabyte's site, so no going back now even though in hindsight that BIOS worked flawlessly for my system. This is when weird stuff started to happen. Reading and writing to external drives connected to the front and back USB ports would randomly cause bluetooth to stop working completely. Reading and writing to the 1TB nvme on the chipset slot could cause the system to freeze up completely. Sometimes USB ports stop working entirely. These would only be fixable by a cold reboot, where I shut off the machine, unplug it, plug it back in, then reboot. I had two files that seem to have gotten corrupted, although I cannot prove that this didn't happen before the BIOS update.
I begin to think that may for some reason or another (perhaps due to the BIOS update), the chipset must be too strained since the issues seem related to bluetooth and ports, particularly when doing a data transfer from an external drive connected to the front and back IO, so I remove the 1TB nvme drive in the chipset slot and try to do an IO stress test. I transfer 300GB of data from an nvme drive to an external SSD connected to the front USB-C port, then I transfer it back to make sure I've covered both read and write operations. Both work fine, so I go to sleep thinking I had solved this.
At this point I have Fedora 38 installed on one nvme and openSUSE on the other. I wake up yesterday and see that updates are available for Fedora, so I apply them in hopes it fixes the GPU issue. After the updates are applied and it reboots, the entire OS is completely unusable. The bluetooth mouse cursor is extremely laggy, the system can't go 2 minutes without freezing, wifi no longer works, bluetooth constantly stops working, ect. (and by "stopped working" I don't mean they simply disconnected. The OS no longer seems to recognize there being wifi and bluetooth available for use on the system.) Basically bricked. It's as if there's no wifi/bluetooth chip in the board at all. I then boot into openSUSE on the other nvme drive and see that there are available updates. Up until this point openSUSE had been rock solid for me. No GPU issues, no wifi/bluetooth issues. I did experience those IO issues, but at this point I thought removing the 1 tb chipset nvme drive had fixed this, so I apply the updates like an idiot. I boot back into openSUSE and it's now bricked just like Fedora. I tried applying the snapshot backups to openSUSE, but it did not help. I try doing fresh installs of Fedora, Fedora KDE, Debian 12, and openSUSE. They all now have this issue.
The next thing I try is reverting the BIOS to F9, newer than the F6 I was originally on, but the oldest BIOS available on the gigabyte website. At first this seemed to do the trick, then I got a full system crash.
I then think maybe I'll see if one of the 2TB 980 Pro SSDs is bad, so I remove them and add back in the 1TB WD Black drive that is at this point been wiped to the first CPU slot. I do a fresh install of Debian 12. There is a noticeable improvement, but still some issues with wifi and bluetooth disconnecting and random system freezes. I then try installing openSUSE. Similar lingering issues; bluetooth mouse is jittery, sometimes disconnects, and wifi doesn't seem to work at all. Downloading apps (~ 1 GB) can cause bluetooth to disappear. At this point I'm thinking clearly something is wrong with the board's bluetooth and wifi, so I order a wifi/bluetooth pcie expansion card.
Overnight, I run y-cruncher to stress test the memory to see if changing the BIOS introduced memory instability. I wake up to find it had crashed about 50 minutes into the test. I install the wifi card into the pcie x2 slot (no x1 slot on my board) and start y cruncher back up again. I let it run for about 3 hrs and there were no crashes. At this point an electrician was scheduled to come over (no electrical issues, just installing a whole home surge protector), so I had to shut off the computer. I resumed y cruncher and at time of writing it is a couple hours in and still no crashes, although the Bluetooth keyboard did disconnect during the stress test and I had to reconnect it- no complete bluetooth meltdowns as before. Bluetooth/wifi are still a little wonky but this could be due to there being two identical wifi chips in the system now and at least the system recognizes that some kind of wifi/bluetooth are present. Bluetooth mouse jitter is now gone completely. This is where I'm at now: system (so far) seems to work okay-ish with only 1 TB nvme in one of the two CPU slots, bluetooth and wifi are extremely unreliable without the installed wifi card which I believe should be identical to the wifi/bluetooth card built into the motherboard.
Sorry for the book. I really appreciate anyone who took the time to actually read it. I guess my question is this: What should I do now? Clearly the built-in bluetooth and wifi of the board is messed up to such an extent that it can cause the whole system to freeze up, which seems to have been brought on by some combination of BIOS/OS updates. Should I RMA the board? Should I try BIOSes F10 and F11? (especially if y-cruncher finds memory errors or it keeps crashing). Should Gigabyte be able to provide me with the F6 BIOS file if I contact them, even if it's no longer downloadable from their site? This was the last BIOS that I can confirm worked for me.
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