Question Lots of Connection Issues not from my Network

Feb 12, 2019
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First off, actually read this. Y'all are really bad about skimming and then asking people looking for help questions they've already answered in the OP. I tried to be thorough here, all the information I have and that y'all regularly ask for is here.

Now to the problem itself. My desktop PC is having lots of issues connecting to stores and apps on my home network, while other devices that access the same stuff do not have the same issues. My phone that accesses Discord, for example, loads things fine on the same network. My laptop, which access the Epic Store and Steam, does so fine on the same network.

My problems are as follows:
  • Discord: Regularly does not load a chat channel's text and images. Regularly does not load images. Sometimes does not even start at all.
  • Epic Store: Regularly does not load into any part of the app that requires internet connectivity.
  • Origin: Basically identical problems to Epic Store
  • Nvidia GeForce Experience: Normally I'd just uninstall this and not think twice about it, but it's yet another app that fails to connect to its servers on a regular basis from my desktop.
  • Steam: Occasionally fails to load the store page.
  • Spotify: Occasionally fails in a very similar manner to Steam, Origin, and Epic. Opening the app but not being able to access anything.
  • General Internet: Occasionally sites like YouTube will behave in a manner similar to the store apps and Discord, loading the site itself but being unresponsive and not loading images. For the most part everything else works, though.
Relevant PC Specs:
  • CPU: i7 8700K
  • RAM: GSKill Ripjaws V 3000
  • Board: Asrock Z370 Extreme4 / MSI Z370-A Pro
  • Cooling: Hyper 212X Dual Fan
  • Storage: 970 Evo M.2, 860 Evo SSD
  • No other expansion cards than video card, multiple power supplies have been tested with this system troubleshooting other problems to no effect. H500 case, airflow is fine.
What I've done so far:
I originally was troubleshooting a problem that I narrowed down to the Hyper 212X just being a piece of trash. (Seriously, the original 212 is still a great option, but that tire fire of a followup has the most poorly conceived mounting system I've ever had the displeasure of having to grapple with.) So yes, I've tried two different boards trying to fix what now seems to have clearly just been a simple cooling issue. I'm fairly certain I didn't cook anything on my CPU, as it never showed extreme heat on any monitoring software (likely it was just not getting great contact to deal with dissipating consistent heat). The performance issues aside from connectivity appear to be gone on the Z370 A-Pro, so I'm convinced the Z370 Extreme4 that was in the PC to begin with didn't simply have a defect.

Throughout this process I've reinstalled windows completely fresh multiple times, from two different sources - one an old retail install media from around the launch of Win10, and one a new install media created from their website. That didn't fix the problems, which began again almost immediately, if not immediately. On initial install the Z370 Extreme4 was unable to connect to the internet and required a patch for older versions of Windows. It did not need it with the updated Win10 install media, and I have not done an install while the Z370-A Pro has been installed. I tried switching over to Google OpenDNS, but that actually made all of the internet connections on the PC stop working.

Yes my BIOS is up to date. Yes, I've installed and uninstalled the Intel LAN drivers provided by the board manufacturers to no effect. Yes I've installed and uninstalled all of the problem programs to see if that fixed anything - sometimes it seemed to resolve the problem on first launch, but after that it returned.
 
Last edited:

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
You have a very basic problem, that I don't yet understand, if switching DNS providers caused your internet to completely stop working.
You will have to start with basic tests. Continuous ping to your router IP. Continuous ping to 8.8.8.8. Are those pings stable?
Is your PC using IPv4 or IPv6?
 
Feb 12, 2019
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You have a very basic problem, that I don't yet understand, if switching DNS providers caused your internet to completely stop working.
You will have to start with basic tests. Continuous ping to your router IP. Continuous ping to 8.8.8.8. Are those pings stable?
Is your PC using IPv4 or IPv6?

Okay, so I took some time to fiddle around and setting my router to use Google DNS kinda seems to have worked. Origin loaded fine the first time, but Discord is still being weird. Launching without loading images and whatnot. IPV6 is disabled, I tried turning it on and setting it to use Google DNS after testing that, and nothing changed.

Ping to the router's IP is fine, as is the ping to 8.8.8.8, changed router DNS to that, and it seemed to resolve Origin connectivity, but not Discord. It probably didn't resolve Origin though, it probably just decided to stop being stupid like it always does eventually.

Current IPv4 is the only protocol active.
 
May 27, 2019
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Did you ever find a solution or cause to this problem? a PC I build recently has this and I cannot seem to figure out how to solve it. I can ping everything fine, but using google dns doesn't really solve things for steam/discord/spotify.