[SOLVED] Is my mobo dying?

bojan_vladek

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Hello people, last few days on my pc were an absolute nightmare. I keep getting random freezes, blue screens, and resets. The freezes usually get relaxed if left alone, but if I push things like task manager or ctrl alt del, then I am immediately bsodded or reset. Does mobo aging do this? What exactly happens when a mobo nears its death?

Why I "kinda" ruled out the other parts:
  • not a year old ssd is probably not causing this,+ i checked its health via software, and it looks good, although there is a slight problem with data transmission sometimes, which i believe i linked to some aging on the port of the mobo?
  • brand new ssd, literally bought yesterday, probably not causing this.
  • a very old hdd, but there is no system related stuff on that disk, just games and software, and all of which run butter smooth. even high performance games
  • probably not the cpu, again i health checked and it passed all tests, besides it never heats to an unsafe degree
  • RAM: did not entirely rule this out, it's the only piece of hardware as old as the mobo, but i've read some stuff about what happens when rams fail, doesn't look like it.
  • psu: quite recently changed, probably not the issue.
  • i've tried different cables to connect the disks, to see maybe it was a cable issue, nope still happens with all kinds of cables.
Don't know what else I can test at this point, I am almost convinved that it's the mobo simply because it's very old, it's not ancient but minimum 5 years have passed for sure. And it does not matter what port I use to connect the system drive to the mobo, the freezings and crashes always randomly happen. So I also ruled out broken ports and such. The only thing I haven't tried is migrating the system to another drive to see if it fixes, in which case the system ssd is broken, but i don't believe not a year old ssd would do this unless faulty, and migrating really is a bother.

Can I have your thoughts? There is no excessive heating in any of the parts, the pc usually behaves when left alone, or even when under load like playing games and such. Nothing really happens during performance hungry games. Or casual stuff, like I'm typing this right now, there's nothing wrong. But there's also no guarantee that it won't freeze 2 minutes later, so let me post this.. Thanks in advance.
 
Solution
have you made sure all drivers, BIOS, and related software for the motherboard are up to date?

with a good quality board there is no "aging" issue that persists across different manufacturers or even models.
for example: i have an AMD AM3+ build that has functioned fine since 2012 even after having heavy gaming and processing going on for years of it's life. also have a Z97 build still functioning fine from 2014 that also has had quite a few years of heavy work.

there's always a chance that a board or certain sockets can be damaged by use or just were not totally functional to begin with but the age shouldn't play a factor. you'll see many threads here at Tom's with people having the same issues with brand new systems they just bought...
have you made sure all drivers, BIOS, and related software for the motherboard are up to date?

with a good quality board there is no "aging" issue that persists across different manufacturers or even models.
for example: i have an AMD AM3+ build that has functioned fine since 2012 even after having heavy gaming and processing going on for years of it's life. also have a Z97 build still functioning fine from 2014 that also has had quite a few years of heavy work.

there's always a chance that a board or certain sockets can be damaged by use or just were not totally functional to begin with but the age shouldn't play a factor. you'll see many threads here at Tom's with people having the same issues with brand new systems they just bought or have just been dismantled for the first time and find something went wrong with the motherboard after reassembly.

your best option would be to test each component separately; try RAM modules one at a time, try disks connected one a time, etc.
make sure your CPU is still seated correctly with new thermal paste.
make sure the CPU and all other components are not running too hot.
if this issue wasn't appearing before the new PSU was installed, try a different PSU.
if you have a dedicated GPU, try your system with onboard graphics and/or a different GPU.
also try swapping out the main components with someone else's to see if the motherboard works fine in that setup.
 
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Solution

bojan_vladek

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Thanks a lot! Your answer is very helpful. I also just remembered one detail I don't know how I forgot to mention, which triggered my troubleshooting in the first place: The PC seems to have a lot of file copying issues. Whenever I especially copy an old folder somewhere else (I started doing that recently to clean and reorganize the pc) the chances of freezing are a lot higher. Like, I'm copying a big folder, one portion of it is maybe corrupt, because the hdd is too old, and then it can't copy it but does not give an error either, and it just freezes. Can that cause crashes and freezes? It might also mean that it's not mobo? But what I don't understand is, like I said earlier, the hdd has no system specific files, it's just a depot for programs and games.

Anyway your answer is very helpful. So basically keep ruling out by individually testing pieces. Trying out the disks one by one is easy enough to do, I'll definitely do that. The RAMs have not been removed at all since I first stuck them in 5 years ago, so they didn't want to come out yesterday but I'll try that again.
 
The PC seems to have a lot of file copying issues. Whenever I especially copy an old folder somewhere else (I started doing that recently to clean and reorganize the pc) the chances of freezing are a lot higher. Like, I'm copying a big folder, one portion of it is maybe corrupt, because the hdd is too old, and then it can't copy it but does not give an error either, and it just freezes. Can that cause crashes and freezes?
one option is to run Windows Disk Check and see if any problems are detected.
  1. Locate C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe
  2. Right-Click cmd.exe and select "Run as administrator".
  3. When Command Prompt launches, *type the command: chkdsk C: /f /r /x
*substitute "C:" for the drive letter(s) in question
 
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bojan_vladek

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Thanks both for your help! I couldn't get to do what you suggested with the command prompt, because the issue disappeared. Everything is working fine now. I took out the old drive and moved the stuff on it to a new ssd. It's been around 4 days, with no freezing issues.

have you made sure all drivers, BIOS, and related software for the motherboard are up to date?

with a good quality board there is no "aging" issue that persists across different manufacturers or even models.
for example: i have an AMD AM3+ build that has functioned fine since 2012 even after having heavy gaming and processing going on for years of it's life. also have a Z97 build still functioning fine from 2014 that also has had quite a few years of heavy work.

there's always a chance that a board or certain sockets can be damaged by use or just were not totally functional to begin with but the age shouldn't play a factor. you'll see many threads here at Tom's with people having the same issues with brand new systems they just bought or have just been dismantled for the first time and find something went wrong with the motherboard after reassembly.

I think you stand corrected that there's nothing wrong with the board. Perhaps it was an application that was installed on the old drive that needed to run, but couldn't because of corrupted segments or something? That's all I can think of. Anyway it's fixed now, thanks a lot for your help!