PC keeps freezing with new motherboard and SSD

[Andrei-Florin Gogan]

Let me apologize in advance for the long post. A very good friend of mine has bought an SSD to replace the old HDD and he also bought a atx motherboard. He has an FX 4100 so I recommended him the Gigabyte 970A-UD3P in case he wants a more powerful CPU later. He bought the motherboard plus an 480GB Kingston SSD. He gave the computer and the new parts to a friend to put them together. When he got the computer back. the PC will just freeze and needed a hard reset. This is happening every 10 minutes or even before entering windows 10. I asked him to give me the PC and I will have a look but I am pretty much stuck after 2 days of troubleshooting. When I got the PC I saw he had a noname power supply and the CPU cable had only 4 pins whilst the motherboard had an 8 pin connector for the CPU. I swapped the PSU with a Corsair CX750 from one of my PC's so I gave the motherboard an 8pin connector to the CPU. Sadly this did not make any difference. I have updated the BIOS to latest version, I gave it a clean and fresh install of Windows 10. I tried different RAM in different slots I even tried booting from the old HDD and it still froze. Now....some of you might say " well, it's the motherboard". The thing that confuses me is that I started the PC in safe mode and it did not froze. If anyone can help or contribute to my troubleshoot I will appreciate a lot. Thank you.

 

[jbaker22]

Just a long shot here, but if you got finger grease on the cpu as you transferred it to the new mobo may cause intermittent problems. You should clean it off with rubbing alcohol just to be sure. Also, have you tried booting with just the psu, power button, ram, cpu fan, and hdd connected? That will take a lot of variable out of the equation.

 

[Andrei-Florin Gogan]

Just a long shot here, but if you got finger grease on the cpu as you transferred it to the new mobo may cause intermittent problems. You should clean it off with rubbing alcohol just to be sure. Also, have you tried booting with just the psu, power button, ram, cpu fan, and hdd connected? That will take a lot of variable out of the equation.

I did not transfer the new cpu. I got the PC with everything already transferred. I did however clean the CPU with isopropanol and applied fresh thermal paste.

 

[1LiquidPC]

Any logs you can check in Event Viewer itself before freezing? What are your temps like, may want to check in the BIOS itself. Also, do the freezes occur before installing any drivers or software after the clean install of Windows 10?

 

[Andrei-Florin Gogan]

In all honesty, I did check the event viewer but I looking at something completely new and have no idea. I did see many error there and will post back tomorrow some of them.Temps are around the 30C mark on idle. BIOS is up to date and can not find anything wrong set up. As said in first post......freezes can be straight after entering windows, can also be after 20 minutes and have seen a few even before windows logo. Freezes occur before drivers installations and after as well. I was thinking that the motherboard may be shorting out and I will try tomorrow to assemble basic parts outside the case.

 

[1LiquidPC]

I'd leave it run in "Safe Mode" for an hour or so w/ networking support. If things are working fine there, it could just be that chipset drivers, ect. need installed to fix the freezes. Any peripherals plugged in besides the keyboard and mouse? Even though you tried different RAM slots, may want to give Memtest86 a shot as well. Temps look normal too.

 

[Andrei-Florin Gogan]

OK so I think I finally got it to work. I have assembled the parts outside the case on the motherboard box and it seems to be fine, no freezing at all. Problem is......my network is not recognized by Windows 10 so I wanted to reset the PC from windows. I get an error " There was a problem resetting your PC , no changes have been made " So I'm using the media creation tool from my personal PC to put on a USB and try it this way.

 

[Andrei-Florin Gogan]

OK ....so I have not fixed anything by doing this 🙁 The PC is still freezing. I will try memtest86 and if it does nto freeze , can I assume that the Windows 10 has a problem rather than the motherboard?

 

[chase702]

try installing a different version of Windows and see if it freezes. Maybe it's just windows 10 that don't have all the drivers for your components yet.

 

[1LiquidPC]

You could try installing Ubuntu Linux (free install on a bootable DVD or USB)as a temporary alternative to test for freezes. Also, as mentioned above, do you have another OS disc/USB laying around w/ Windows 7 for example? It will run for 3 days without needed activated giving you time to test for freezing.

 

[Andrei-Florin Gogan]

Well I told my friend to bring me the Windows7 that he had before and test that. If Windows 7 does not work, he will send the motherboard back and get a replacement.