[SOLVED] ryzen 3600 system dead, but why and how?

[Krarilotus]

Last August i ve build a gaming Rig for a friend of mine with the following specs:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 3600
Mobo: MSI B450-A PRO MAX
PSU: 600 Watt be-quiet! System Power 9 Non-Modular 80+ Bronze
RAM: 16GB (2x8) Crucial Ballistix Sport LT V2 Single Rank grau DDR4-3000 DIMM CL 15-16-16 Dual Kit
Grafic: 8 GB Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 Pulse 8 G GDDR6
SSD: 500GB WD Blue M.2 2280 SATA 6Gb/s 3D NAND
HDD: 2000GB WD Blue WD20EZRZ 5.400U/min 64MB cache
Case: Antec P7 Silent gedämmt Midi Tower

After building the PC and installing all the drivers, i ve stresstestet it for a short time with CPU-Z and played some League of Legends on it, to ensure everything works. Sure thats not sufficient for a real test, but the PC felt good, new and why would there be anything wrong with it right?

So i gave it to him, and he played some games on it. The PC crashed after a couple of League of Legends Games, while he was in the client. I was concerned but he didnt care to much and it worked fine afterwards for a longer time. But then the crashes appeared again, not really under load but just randomly the PC would crash. He didnt really reach out to me, for fixing that problem, as the PC just seemed to work fine afterwards.
But then last weekend, his PC crashed again after loading into a League of Legends game. Ofc he played other more demanding titles on that PC just fine and crashless.

But after that crash, the PC would go into a 'windows repair' loop.
I came over to look at the problem, and first thing i was suspicious abt, was that the powersupply was casuing the problems. I mean, random power outages should be because of the PSU right?
But actually he just wanted the PC to work again, so we decided, after we couldnt escape the repair loop, to reinstall windows on his machine.

So we used the windows10 bootstick, wiped the SSD, formated it, and then left the PC installing windows (was abt 4% when we went to eat sth). When we came back, we found the PC with an orange screen and white vertical stripes all over it.

So that didnt work, huh?
We wanted to see where that error came from and tried to boot on that stick again. That worked so far, but as soon as we would click the button after selecting Windows 10 Pro (or any other version) we would get the PC to hard shut down and restart. So there was definitly something wrong here.
Reproduceable btw.

I went out and bought a new powersupply and new mobo, just to identify the problem.
PSU: Corsair TX750M 80 Plus Gold
Mobo: MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX
We then tried all possible combinations of one/two ramsticks, one drive or 2 drives, either PSU, either motherboard, my or his grafics card (mine is a EVGA GTX 980) and all kinds of bios versions on the original Motherboard aswell as resetinng by removing CMOS battery and such things. I am now out of tricks to pull.
With a different bootstick, it wouldnt even get to the menu to choose from the windows versions.
It seems like the only component we couldnt really change was the CPU.
But the indicator lights would only turn on when there was a component missing, never otherwise. So the CPU light only turned on shortly like all the indicator lights on the mainboards would, when the PC restarts.

Can the Ryzen 3600 be faulty, without the CPU Light turning on? We were always able to get into the bios, that was never an issue. But no bios options made a difference, we tried all forum and reddit threads we could find over the internet, even partly related to B450 Mobos from MSI. Most of them are not even MAX versions. But nothing helped.

Please, can someone give me a hint, what to do? Or do we need to RMA the CPU?

Greetings,
Krarilotus

 

[ttower2020]

If you have done that much trial and error, I would say the CPU is probably bad. I do not know the answer to your specific question about the BIOS and stuff like that, but a new mobo, gpu, and psu should have fixed any issues you had. I would RMA the CPU, since that seems like the next thing to try. If you want to try a new CPU before going through an RMA process, maybe look at the Althon series as a test CPU? They are pretty cheap, I think $50 off the top of my head.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

What cooler were you using? Stock? I recall working on an FX 6 core system once that was would blue screen at random. Ended up replacing the CPU and installed a hyper 212. Think the only other time that system had issues was when the fan on the hyper 212 died.

 

[Krarilotus]

Thank you very much for your answers... Yes i will get a new CPU now, to try. I just cant wrap my head around having a bad CPU while the indicator light doesnt show.

I installed the stock cooler. I used my own thermal paste, as the temps on installation were seeming a bit high. Arctic MX-4. But the temps were still at abt 70 to 80 degrees under load in the summer. But when i looked here, i saw many people having those temps so i thought that should be fine.

My own lynfield intel system from many years ago ran at almost 100 degrees for a long time and never had trouble. But maybe those ryzens are more fragile?

I ll keep you posted what happens when installing a new CPU on tuesday.

 

[Krarilotus]

It turned out to be the CPU. We changed it for a new ryzen 3600, which worked fine from right after the swap.

Good to know, that these CPU's can just fail after half a year of normal use, no OC, standart ram and voltage settings and standart cpu cooler.

I am definitly not going to buy any ryzensystem myself soon. Lets hope, that after getting a CPU replacement through warranty, he will not be facing the same issue again, after half a year!

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Are you still using the standard cooler? It may not be a bad idea to spend a little money now for something like a hyper 212 just to be safe.

 

[dorsai]

It turned out to be the CPU. We changed it for a new ryzen 3600, which worked fine from right after the swap.

Good to know, that these CPU's can just fail after half a year of normal use, no OC, standart ram and voltage settings and standart cpu cooler.

I am definitly not going to buy any ryzensystem myself soon. Lets hope, that after getting a CPU replacement through warranty, he will not be facing the same issue again, after half a year!

All cpu types can have errors that only pop up once the core has been pushed for a while...you're talking 4,800 million transistors on the cpu...even running a full tilt Six Sigma manufacturing process won't capture every single error in months and years of production.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Poster above has a good point. IMO though the wraith stealth seems dinky. So still wouldn't be a bad idea to grab a beefier cooler for peace of mind.

 

[Krarilotus]

Its not getting overclocked, and the heavy loads are rare, so its barely pushed anywhere. I therefore wont buy another cooler, if he wants it maybe, but in the end the box cooler should work just fine. I had my intel chip with its box cooler, which was way worse and works still up to this time, after gettng pushed way harder and even getting overclocked. Good old Lynfield i7 860...

But yeah, maaybe CPU quality has just gone down over the years.

 

[Gfost73]

did you make sure MB bios is 100% up to date?

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Its not getting overclocked, and the heavy loads are rare, so its barely pushed anywhere. I therefore wont buy another cooler, if he wants it maybe, but in the end the box cooler should work just fine. I had my intel chip with its box cooler, which was way worse and works still up to this time, after gettng pushed way harder and even getting overclocked. Good old Lynfield i7 860...

But yeah, maaybe CPU quality has just gone down over the years.

I would not be inclined to agree. Usually when I've seen cpus fail, they are due to heat. Either coolers not being adequate or people not cleaning their system out. But I will say in my opinion, the wraith stealth seems a bit dinky to me. So I won't run mine using that cooler.