Monitor loses signal, PC freezes shortly after

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zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
0
10
Hey guys, I've been driven absolutely mad by this problem that has kept happening for a few months, and nothing I do seems to solve it. As per title the monitor loses signal and the PC seems to crash after a few seconds (if I have audio playing, I will keep hearing it fine for a little while before it stops).

It appears to be completely random: sometimes it happens once a day, sometimes multiple times in a row, whether I'm gaming or just web browsing. Very rarely I get a BSOD, or the pc freezes while the monitor still has signal. A couple of times I discovered that after the crash the power buttons on my case weren't working, and had to shut down the PC from the PSU switch.

After doing all the various Win 10 troubleshoots I thought it was due to overheating (I had a very old GPU) but after replacing it the problem persisted. I checked the temperatures and everything seemed normal, so I assumed it could be a RAM issue. Tried using one stick at a time thinking maybe one was faulty, but no improvements. I also did a memtest that didn't find any errors. Formatting my SSD and reinstalling Windows also didn't change anything. Even tried a different monitor, with obviously no result.

What do you think could be the problem? PSU, Motherboard? I don't really have replacements at hand to swap them out, is there anything else I can do to test them?

Here's my specs:

CPU: Ryzen 5 1600 3.2 GHz Six-core
Motherboard: Asrock AB350M Pro4
GPU: ASUS Strix RX 570 4GB
RAM: G.skill DDR4 3200 Mhz (4GBx2)
PSU: Antec High Current Gamer 620W
SSD: BX500 Crucial 240GB
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB
OS: Win 10 Pro 64 bit
Monitor: Philips 222E (1080p)

Thanks in advance for any help!
 
Solution
Darkbreeze
That's exactly why I didn't recommend it at first, because you already had an issue with ONE ASRock board. Otherwise I might even have recommended the B450 Pro4, but since you had questions with your current B350 Pro4 I figured you'd balk at that. Honestly though, if the board IS your problem, I think it's likely just a matter of there is likely to be one board with a fault for every so many that are put out, regardless of model or brand, and you got unlucky. I actually much prefer ASRock and ASUS over MSI. Gigabyte makes good boards, but I've seen some issues with a lack of granularity and missing features in their bios over the last few generations such as only being able to adjust memory voltage by .020v increments rather than the...
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Z

zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
0
10


Thank you for the clarification - one thing though, after starting up the Blend mode I noticed that more than the RAM (which were sitting at around 44% usage) it was the CPU that was getting quite a lot of stress (100% usage) and most importantly the temperature skyrocketed to something like 75° with a max of 78°. That kinda scared me since I've never seen my CPU go over 50° before - is that normal? It kinda worries me especially since I'm supposed to run it for hours.

And absolutely don't worry about the confusion - you've been insanely helpful and I can't thank you enough - I hope I didn't sound bothered, I just wanted to clarify the situation :)

About bumping up the DRAM - I actually completely forgot, I'm really sorry. I'm not really sure how to modify it as I've never done it before, but I'll check out some guide and give that a shot as well
 
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Darkbreeze

Darkbreeze

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Jun 24, 2014
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First of all, your CPU is fine until about 85°C, but you want the system configured so that it doesn't ever exceed 80°C. It could actually go higher than 85 before it begins to throttle, but for long term longevity 80°C is the maximum you want to see the system reach when you are doing any kind of stress or thermal testing. So you are actually, just, within tolerance.

The fact that you are not overclocking concerns me that you have that high of a temp BUT if you were running any version other than 26.6, it would be expected, because AVX versions of Prime95 run significantly higher temps than 26.6 which is a non-AVX version.

As for the memory testing, try this procedure, which should eliminate FFT sizes that create extremely high temps.

Final testing with Prime95​


It is highly advisable that you do a final test using Prime95 version 26.6 (And ONLY version 26.6 except as noted below) choosing the Custom test. You can also use the Blend mode option but after a fair amount of personal testing, asking questions from some long time members with engineering level degrees that have forgotten more about memory architectures than you or I will ever know, and gathering opinions from a wide array of memory enthusiasts around the web, I'm pretty confident that the custom option is a lot more likely to find errors with the memory configuration, and faster, if there are any to be found.

Please note as this is rather important, if you prefer, or have problems running version 26.6 because you have a newer platform that doesn't want to play nice with version 26.6, you can use the latest version of Prime95 with the Custom test selected but you will need to make the following change.

If you wish to use a newer version than 26.6 make the following edit to the "local.txt" file located in the Prime95 folder.

Find the line value that specifies CpuSupportsAVX=1, and change it to CpuSupportsAVX=0

Then click File-->Save, and then close the document.

Now open Prime95.

Click on "Custom". Input a value of 512k in the minimum FFT size field. Leave the maximum FFT size field at 4096k. In the "Memory to use" field you should take a look at your current memory allocation in either HWinfo or system resource monitor. Whatever "free" memory is available, input approximately 75% of that amount. So if you currently have 16GB of installed memory, and approximately 3GB are in use or reserved leaving somewhere in the neighborhood of 13GB free, then enter something close to 75% of that amount.

So if you have 13GB free, or something reasonably close to that, then 75% of THAT would be 9.75GB, which, when multiplies times 1024 will roughly equal about 9984MB. You can average things out by simply selecting the closest multiple of 1024 to that amount just to keep it simple, so we'll say 10 x 1024= 10240mb and enter that amount in the field for "Memory to use (MB)". We are still well within the 13GB of unused memory BUT we have left enough memory unused so that if Windows decides to load some other process or background program, or an already loaded one suddenly needs more, we won't run into a situation where the system errors out due to lack of memory because we've dedicated it all to testing.

I've experienced false errors and system freezes during this test from over allocating memory, so stick to the method above and you should be ok.


Moving right along, do not change the time to run each FFT size.Leave that set to 15 minutes.

Click run and run the Custom test for 8 hours. If it passed Memtest86 and it passes 8 hours of the Custom test, the memory is 100% stable, or as close to it as you are ever likely to get but a lot of experts in the area of memory configuration suggest that running the extended Windows memory diagnostic test is also a pretty good idea too.

If you get errors, (and you will want to run HWinfo alongside Prime95 so you can periodically monitor each thread as Prime will not stop running just because one worker drops out, so you need to watch HWinfo to see if there are any threads not showing 100% usage which means one of the workers errored and was dropped) then you need to either change the timings, change the DRAM voltage or change the DRAM termination voltage, which should be approximately half of the full DRAM voltage.

There are also other bios settings that can affect the memory configuration AND stability, such as the VCCIO and system agent voltages, so if you have problems with stability at higher clock speeds you might want to look at increasing those slightly. Usually, for Intel at least, something in the neighborhood of 1.1v on both those is pretty safe. There are a substantial number of guides out there covering those two settings, but most of them are found within CPU overclocking guides so look there in guides relevant to your platform.

As a further measure of assurance that your WHOLE configuration is stable, you can download and run the Realbench stress test for 8 hours. If the system freezes or fails when running Realbench with your full memory amount set, try running it again but select only half your amount of installed memory.
 
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Z

zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
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10


So I went into the BIOS to bump up the DRAM voltage - I noticed that it was set to Auto, with 1.200V next to it. I tried bumping it up by small increments like .005v/.010v/.015v but it defaulted back to 1.200V. I tried using higher increments and noticed that it would only stick with 1.250V and 1.300V, so I tested the PC with those two settings (since you said not to go over 1.3V) but unfortunately I haven't noticed any differences.

Just to be sure that I haven't made some basic mistakes, this is my RAM. I checked out the QVL for my current motherboard (this one) and I didn't seem to find them on there, although very similar models were. I don't think there should be any compatibility problem, but what would you say?

By the way thanks for the in-depth explanation, I'll try doing this last test with Prime95 and see how it goes. I have a stock CPU cooler and my case (a Bitfenix Nova) doesn't exactly have a ton of fans or top tier air flow, so that might explain why my CPU temperature is a bit higher than it probably should be during these kinds of extreme tests.

I'd like to understand better what we're trying to figure out with the Prime95 test though - I pretty much expect for the problem to pop up during the middle of the test and freeze my pc, since it happens even when the PC is on very light load if I use it for a few hours (like when I'm just browsing with Chrome and stuff like that) so I wouldn't really be sure if the PC crashed specifically because of the stress test or not. Is there something specific that I'm looking for, like certain kind of errors that can only be caused by the RAM failing due to the test?

Sorry in advance if you have to explain things to me like I'm a 5 year old, but unfortunately I have next to no experience with these kind of things, as you've probably figured out :lol:
 
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Darkbreeze

Darkbreeze

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Jun 24, 2014
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It's all good. Everybody is like a 5 year old when they start down the path.

Unfortunately there's really not a way to differentiate since you have the problem at the default configuration and I'd probably abandon the memory testing for now because I'm believing this is likely a hardware or software problem, not a configuration issue.

First, I would do a clean install of Windows 10 version 1809.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Click on the download tool option (Not the Update now option), create the installation media and then follow the instructions, including disconnecting ALL other drives during the installation, as I have outlined here:

Windows 10 Clean install tutorial
 
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Z

zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
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Done - to make sure that the automated updates wouldn't mess with things I also unplugged my ethernet cable before installing Windows and then installed the latest motherboard and GPU drivers from a pen drive. Unfortunately I still got a no signal + freeze after about two hours.

At this point I feel like I might just take my chances and change the motherboard. Do you happen to have any suggestions for specific models? After looking around a bit I was thinking about this one as it seems to be one of the better options around that price range, but I'd like to know your opinion since you already helped me a ton with choosing a PSU.

That is, unless there are still more things that I can try - though I feel like we have pretty much ran out of options :(
 
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Z

zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
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It's the Bitfenix Nova - it should fit a full size ATX, If I remember correctly the reason I ended up with my current mATX is simply because I found it for a much better price.
 
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Darkbreeze

Darkbreeze

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Jun 24, 2014
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Honestly, I'd spend a few bucks more and go with this board. B450 chipset is highly preferrable to B350. There are some improvements and there is much better memory compatibility. Every other B350 or B450 board below the cost of this board are all models that I've seen issues on here at some point or other. Honestly, you get what you pay for and 110 bucks for a motherboard is actually REALLY cheap. I usually recommend not spending less than about 125-160 bucks if you want something high quality that will tend to last and have a good feature set.

There are things people don't even think about such as weak onboard LAN versus Intel LAN. Weak VRMs and power delivery. Thinner PC board material that often results in broken traces or solder points. Lack of some fan or SATA headers. Poor onboard sound. These are all only a few of the things that might make up the difference between a 70-90 dollar board and one that's 20-40 bucks more.

I'd choose this one, minimum, if I was doing the build. Even if it was for somebody else and not myself. If it was for me I'd probably do with the X470 Pro or X470 Taichi, but for the B450 chipset this would be my favored option under 140 bucks.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Motherboard: Asus - ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING ATX AM4 Motherboard ($109.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $109.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-12-10 22:28 EST-0500
 
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Z

zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
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That board look absolutely awesome, but honestly with the fact that I had to recently spend for my PSU and GPU I'd really rather go with something a bit less expensive - especially since I'm actually from Europe and all the prices I've seen for that B450-F go around 140-150 euros with no rebates, which means I'd have to wait a bit more before being able to grab it.

Are there really no motherboards that you would be even just ok with for a lower price? (around 90 euros is the max that I can really spend right now) I know penny pinching when it comes to mobos isn't a great idea but since I don't even know yet that this is definitely going to solve the problem I think I would rather upgrade to something better down the line and just go with something that I can buy and try right away.
 
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Z

zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
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10


Thanks once again - I'd love to get the Strix but I'm afraid I'll have to settle for this one for now.
Even though to be honest I'm a bit nervous about getting another Asrock, since my current one seems to be the cause of all my problems :lol: Hopefully I'll have more luck with this one.

Out of curiosity, what are your opinions on this MSI motherboard? It's the one I was initially considering, before I unfortunately had to take into account my budget constraints.
 
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Darkbreeze

Darkbreeze

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Jun 24, 2014
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That's exactly why I didn't recommend it at first, because you already had an issue with ONE ASRock board. Otherwise I might even have recommended the B450 Pro4, but since you had questions with your current B350 Pro4 I figured you'd balk at that. Honestly though, if the board IS your problem, I think it's likely just a matter of there is likely to be one board with a fault for every so many that are put out, regardless of model or brand, and you got unlucky. I actually much prefer ASRock and ASUS over MSI. Gigabyte makes good boards, but I've seen some issues with a lack of granularity and missing features in their bios over the last few generations such as only being able to adjust memory voltage by .020v increments rather than the standard .005v increments, and lack of good fan curve profile features.

Those might be improved on the very latest Gigabyte boards, I don't know for sure, but I think not.
 
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Solution
Z

zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
0
10


I can definitely believe that I got unlucky, knowing my track record :lol:

Everything I've seen by surfing forums though seems to point out that freezing problems seem pretty common with the AB350M Pro4 (I even found one dude that RMA'd it, got a replacement and the same exact problem popped up again after 3 months) but I'm pretty sure that if anything it's just an issue with that particular model.

I mean, I doubt there's an instability between Ryzen CPUs and ALL Asrock motherboards, that would just be silly.
In any case I guess I'm going to find out.
Thanks once more for all the help, I'll update again (hopefully for the last time) once I get the board and give it a spin.
 
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Darkbreeze

Darkbreeze

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Jun 24, 2014
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I hope you have no further troubles, if you do, then we'll try to figure out what it is. I would also contact ASRock and inform them of both your problem AND your conclusion from other people having the same issue on that board. It could be as simple as them needing to release a fixed bios for it.


In fact, you might even try an older bios version to see if the problem remains.
 
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Z

zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
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When the problem surfaced I still had the original BIOS version that the motherboard came with (I believe 3.0?) then I updated it to 3.40 and finally to the most recent 5.10 - unfortunately the freezes happened with all three. I'll definitely give Asrock a shout, though if the posts I've found on the forums are to be believed they should already be well aware of the problem.

P.S. I swear this is the last question for at least a few days :D I bumped my budget very slightly to 100 euros, what do you think of this Asus motherboard? I was just about to place the order on the Asrock one when my indecisiveness got the better of me
 
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Z

zeghart

Nov 28, 2018
22
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10
It's been around 2 days since the new motherboard arrived and I installed it, and after quite a bit of use I have yet to experience the problem. I'm not sure I feel comfortable quite yet to say that the problem is solved (I think I'll want to test it for a few more days to be sure) but if anything it has become much less frequent.

Thank you darkbreeze once again for the valuable help :)
 
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