Question MSI B450 Tomahawk Max II crashing problems

[SupremeChampion]

So I built my new PC using MSI B450 Tomahawk Max II and a Ryzen 5 5600X combo. I did the BIOS update to the latest non-beta version that supports Ryzen 5 CPUs. That got rid of the Debug CPU red flashing light (albeit it is still visible during startup, it just goes away after 5-10 seconds or so).

However, completely randomly I get a crash every 1-2 weeks, where everything stops working and I have to force shut down.

What's more, sometimes my PC won't reboot immediately afterwards either (I had to wait like 10 minutes and then it did after having reset the lights on the mobo). The 2nd thing (more serious) has happened to me twice, both times it auto-reset the lights on the mobo which I had previously changed with MSI Mystic light which I IMMEDIATELY unninstalled completely afterwards because it is infamous for causing problems. However, again, 20 minutes ago the same thing happened.

Why is this happening? I thought it was XMP and memory problems but I disabled it so that my system would be stable. Still it happened. Any ideas?

Is it going to be fine now if I never touch MSI Center and the lights again? I am so confused and frustrated... I hope I made sense.

I probably should run a memcheck just to be able to write off the memory as the culprit.

But what does the resetting of the rgb mobo lights mean? Did the mobo do a factory reset by itself?

 

[Ed_Grimley]

Hey SupremeChampion,

I feel your pain - I have been fighting similar issues with this motherboard. Though I have an older processor - a Ryzen 7 2700.
(PC Crashes though remains powered. The CPU light comes on solid. I force a restart and everything is back to normal.. for a while.)

Like you mentioned I also turned off XMP. And it seems that I have less frequent issues if I allow the RAM to run at its SPD default of 2133 MHz at 1.2 V.
Sometimes it is 4-5 months between crashes. Which makes it very difficult to tell if the issue has been resolved after trying a change.

I recently realized I made a pretty simple mistake in selecting my memory. The memory I am using is on the official support list if I were using a 3000 series Ryzen 7, but it is not on the official support list for my 2700. (A little embarrassing.)

Likely you have already checked this - but is the part number for your memory kit on AMD's list for Ryzen 3000 or later?
https://www.amd.com/en/products/ryzen-compatible-memory

You could also check on the compatibility section of MSI's Tomahawk page - the memory compatibility is broken down by processor core. Since I'm on a 2000 series (Pinnacle Ridge) I should have noticed that my memory was not on the "Memory by RX-2X00" list. I think the core name for your 5600X is Vermeer. Looks like they don't have a 5000 series list for the Tomahawk board, but based on AMD's site specifying 3000 series and later, I expect if your memory is on the "Memory by RX-3X00" list it shouldn't be a compatibility problem.
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B450-TOMAHAWK-MAX/support#support-main-block-qvl

Best of luck! And if you have break through I'd be curious to hear it.

 

[SupremeChampion]

Well after it happened again, I ruled out the GPU as a culprit and went full nuclear. I took backups of important documents and I formated EVERYTHING. So the changes I made were:

1. Clean install windows again + format all other data disks.
2. I actually removed the old secondary 128Gb SSD since I didn't really need it just in case it was faulty.
3. I stopped having my web cam regularly plugged in. I now only plug it in when I need to use it.
4. I changed the power strip just in case (old one was from 1993 lol).
5. I didn't install Advances System Care this time.

It's been almost 3 weeks and I am glad to say it has not happened again. I can't tell if it's fixed. I theoretically will never be able to tell (halting problem). However, a month without an incident from dealing with this on a weekly (even daily) basis seems promising.

If it IS fixed, then again I don't know which of these changes fixed it.

It may have just been some software problem that carried over from the data disks. E.g. by using programs previously installed there from my previous PC? Maybe some background task that gets arbitrarily scheduled to run was triggering this.

I am also suspecting the web cam. I know it sounds crazy and it's not like the freeze occured while using it, but if I recall correctly the problem started appearing around the time I got this webcam when I still had the old PC.

As much as I think I know about computers, something like this happens and makes me question everything.

 

[sizzling]

What’s the full pc spec including make and model of psu?

 

[SupremeChampion]

What’s the full pc spec including make and model of psu?

As I mentioned, this problem carried over from my old PC from which I only transfered 2 secondary disks and the GPU (and the webcam!). Everything else is new. I find it very unlikely that I happened to land upon the same problem with exactly different hardware parts.

PSU is CoolerMaster 650W Gold,
CPU is Ryzen 5 5600X,
Mobo is MSI B450 Tomahawk Max II with updated bios for Ryzen Gen 3,
RAM is G-skill Aegis 8GB DDR4 RAM 3200MHz,
GPU is GigaByte Nvidia GTX 1660 OC Mini