[SOLVED] MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX struggling to POST

[BangarangDarunia]

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
Motherboard: MSI B450 Tomahawk Max
Ram: CORSAIR VENGEANCE RGB PRO 2x8GB DDR4 3600
GPU: MSI RADEON RX 580 ARMOR
PSU: Corsair RM750 750w
Chassis: Fractal Design Define C TG ATX Mid
OS: Windows 10 Home

Hi everyone! Going a bit crazy here - any help would be really appreciated.

I've been using the build for a couple of months now (mainly for gaming) without any issue. One day when trying to boot to windows I get several varying BSOD messages, SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED being the most consistent. After a few attempts, the errors disappeared and instead a frozen windows is repairing screen would be the furthest I could get.

Thinking this would be a windows repair situation, I tried to run diagnostics from a USB windows image but whenever I try and boot from the USB I hit another BSOD: windows couldnt be loaded because code integrity failed to initialize. No route through to windows seemingly.

Some Google research suggested this was a driver problem and that flashing the bios could help. Clearing CMOS didn't help via battery or flash button. I tried to update the bios to latest, which seemed to work (gets to 100% and shuts off) but still didn't resolve the issue.

I'm now at a point where neither booting from SSD nor USB gets past repair or BSOD and now starting up the pc seems to sporadically skip between showing nothing and getting to boot.

When the pc won't start up, there's always power to the fans, but the mobos EZ debug lights switch between CPU, ramm and VGA (when on VGA it loads the bios).

I've tried reseating almost everything but seeing as it was working fine for so long, that feels like less of problem than the mobo or BIOS (but I could be waaaay off).

I'm really going crazy here and can't tell if I'm narrowing down to an underlying cause or if I'm just making things worse.

Please let me know if I've left anything off and if you can think of anything that could help more.

Thanks so much everyone!

EDIT
- Pc seems to behave better after leaving powered off for a while. Could be luck but seems like the only repeatable thing so far.

- usb media repair works fine on another pc

- same issue when trying with an old msi n750ti TF graphics card

 

[Crosslhs82x2]

Good point on the drive.
As I stated earlier I had a crucial mx500 that got rma'd that was a bsod nightmare.

My best luck with drives have been Samsung and 2x 120gb Pny drives which was my first ssd's that are storage drives now.
I can't say anything good or bad on Kingston as I have never used any of there products.

Did you have a different drive you can try?
Depending on memtest results.

 

[damric]

For SATA drives, the MX300 has power loss protection, but they are hard to find anymore. I'd get an M.2 NVMe drive if your board has a slot. I've done a few recent builds with the Silicon Power A80 and my clients loved it because it's so fast and cheap for the 500GB and 1TB models. NVMe drives also seem much more resistant to hard shutdowns than SATA SSDs.

 

[Crosslhs82x2]

Ya my samsung m.2's have been very good.
He does have the the ability for m.2

If he has another drive that would help confirm.

 

[BangarangDarunia]

Thanks everyone for your amazing help so far. I'm shocked by how much this community has helped out!

Memtest had been crashing after 3 seconds on the build.
I managed to get hold of a spare motherboard and CPU to try out the other components which identified the RAM as being the culprit!

I'm now back in with new RAM and all seems fine (for now). Would this have been the motherboard which corrupted the RAM or just faulty modules? I'm not too sure which manufacturer I should contact.

Thanks again!

 

[Crosslhs82x2]

Would have to say if the old mother board was tried with another set of ram and runs it was the ram and can't blame the board.

But you were using 3600mhz which is a bit high for a 2000 series cpu.

 

[Lalthaa]

I have read all your post and some how iam glad to say to i am facing the exact problem ur facing as i am speaking.
I have face this issue for a whole month now and still looking for and answer. I have tried every thing i know
Ps i hope you find the solution , looking up on ur post.

 

[BangarangDarunia]

I have read all your post and some how iam glad to say to i am facing the exact problem ur facing as i am speaking.
I have face this issue for a whole month now and still looking for and answer. I have tried every thing i know
Ps i hope you find the solution , looking up on ur post.

Hi Lalthaa,

As above, replacing the RAM solved the issue for me. It seems as if both sticks of RAM had become corrupt (possibly through mismatch of MHz to CPU series as Crosslhs82x2 mentioned).

Hopefully the solution works for you and that you're able to test with other RAM without waiting for replacements as I did!