Question Seemingly random BSODS on newly built PC

[Marvin42s]

Just under a month ago, I built my dream rig that I had been saving and looking forward to for about a year. The specs are:

MSI Ventus OC RTX 2070 Super
Intel i5 9600K
AORUS Z390 PRO WIFI
16gb DDR4 Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB Ram
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition RGB

I recycled the disks from my old PC, so I'm not sure on specific models, but I know I have a 250gb Samsung SSD for my OS and a 1tb Seagate HDD for games storage. I also re-used a Corsair CX750m PSU. I had some overheating problems at first, but after adding a bunch more premium case fans and massively improving air flow, this hasn't bothered me since.

What is bothering me, and causing me to completely lose grip on reality, is the completely random BSODs that are occurring. I looked in bluescreenview, and they all seem to be caused by the ntoskrnl.exe driver. Sometimes there's a different address at the end of it, but that's it. The worst thing? I'm not even getting consistent errors. Each BSOD has a different error, ranging from IRQL-NOT-LESS-OR-EQUAL to PAGE-FAULT-IN-NONPAGED-AREA to KMODE-EXCEPTION-NOT-HANDLED. There are a bunch more that I can list if necessary. They never seem to happen when I'm gaming, but that could change. It's most commonly happened when I've just gone downstairs to make myself some dinner, and I come back upstairs to the rig just to find that it's restarted and there's a new dmp file in bluescreenview. However, last night it happened the second I pressed the close button on Google Chrome.
I've spent nearly a month trying everything to fix this. I reinstalled windows, I rolled back drivers and updated drivers, I've flashed and updated the BIOS, I've turned off XMP and intel turbo boost, I've installed every compatible driver from the AORUS website for my mobo, I've done disk error checks, chkdsk, Windows memory diagnostic and system file checks. After a few of the crashes, chkdsk or sfc would sometimes find corruption but it would claim to fix it.

I'm moving in less than a month, and it would be exceptionally useful if I could have this fixed by then so I don't have to stress about a broken PC on top of a relocation, can anybody help me figure out what on earth is wrong with this computer?

Attached here are the .dmp files from the last 4 BSODs that have occurred, I don't have any from before these as I reinstalled Windows in an attempt to fix it.

 

[PC Tailor]

Welcome to the forums my friend!

I looked in bluescreenview, and they all seem to be caused by the ntoskrnl.exe driver.

I tend to recommend avoiding using third party software for debugging, they more just display information, rather than actually debug the dump file, and often blame the wrong thing. Bluescreen is better, but still only really a translator. A full debug is the best way to approach it.

The example here being ntoskrnl.exe - likelihood this isn't the cause at all, only simply what actually crashed at the time, something else caused it to crash, which is usually third party drivers or hardware.

I have ran just the first dump file and after seeing the results, I didn't feel it to be necessary to run the others just yet (I will go into detail lower down) - you can see the full report here: https://pste.eu/p/8xt2.html

Summary of findings:

WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR (124)
A fatal hardware error has occurred. Parameter 1 identifies the type of error source that reported the error. Parameter 2 holds the address of the WHEA_ERROR_RECORD structure that describes the error conditon.

Arguments:
Arg1: 0000000000000007, BOOT Error
Arg2: ffffc3096df35038, Address of the WHEA_ERROR_RECORD structure.
Arg3: 0000000000000000
Arg4: 0000000000000000

Firstly, it is a WHEA error, which stands for Windows Hardware Error Architecture and your paramater 1 is a 7 bugcheck, which is a boot error. You guessed it, WHEA is pretty much solely attributed to hardware problems. Not always, but nearly all the time. The other thing i noticed when I debugged it is that you only had 1 third party module running - Intel RST - which isn't a known BSOD, but certainly can, and may be associated to boot errors.

This can be for a variety of reasons, the most common being a component overheating. So considering the bugcheck you have encountered, I would consider the following:

• Confirm if you can boot into safe mode normally?
• Did you clean reinstall windows when you changed hardware?
• Have you checked temperatures of your components?
• Are you able to use HD Sentinel to check the SMART status of your storage drives?
• Do you have latest BIOS installed?

 

[Marvin42s]

Welcome to the forums my friend!


I tend to recommend avoiding using third party software for debugging, they more just display information, rather than actually debug the dump file, and often blame the wrong thing. Bluescreen is better, but still only really a translator. A full debug is the best way to approach it.

The example here being ntoskrnl.exe - likelihood this isn't the cause at all, only simply what actually crashed at the time, something else caused it to crash, which is usually third party drivers or hardware.

I have ran just the first dump file and after seeing the results, I didn't feel it to be necessary to run the others just yet (I will go into detail lower down) - you can see the full report here: https://pste.eu/p/8xt2.html

Summary of findings:


Firstly, it is a WHEA error, which stands for Windows Hardware Error Architecture and your paramater 1 is a 7 bugcheck, which is a boot error. You guessed it, WHEA is pretty much solely attributed to hardware problems. Not always, but nearly all the time. The other thing i noticed when I debugged it is that you only had 1 third party module running - Intel RST - which isn't a known BSOD, but certainly can, and may be associated to boot errors.

This can be for a variety of reasons, the most common being a component overheating. So considering the bugcheck you have encountered, I would consider the following:

• Confirm if you can boot into safe mode normally?
• Did you clean reinstall windows when you changed hardware?
• Have you checked temperatures of your components?
• Are you able to use HD Sentinel to check the SMART status of your storage drives?
• Do you have latest BIOS installed?

Being as yours is a boot error, I'd consider the following:

First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to try and help me out here - it's very much appreciated as this has been driving me up the wall.

However, most of these errors don't occur during boot, most of them occur after the PC has been running for a few hours. I only believe one of these blue screens has occurred on boot, does that change anything?

edit: Have also been checking the temperatures of my components consistently since I overhauled the cooling in my PC and everything seems normal in that section. GPU Peaks at around 60-70 during intensive gaming and the processor stays under 30 at idle and goes just over 30 during gaming. The only thing that worries me is the PCH, which can get quite hot, up to 49 degrees celsius, during incredibly intensive games like Watch_Dogs 2.

 

[PC Tailor]

First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to try and help me out here - it's very much appreciated as this has been driving me up the wall.

However, most of these errors don't occur during boot, most of them occur after the PC has been running for a few hours. I only believe one of these blue screens has occurred on boot, does that change anything?

Yes, as whilst BSOD can have different causes, it's not often that someone has 2 causes present at the same time. Usually all the BSOD are occurring for the same reason, just appears in different ways (in most cases).

The fact that it has happened on boot would be more indicative of hardware, OS, or firmware as its prior to any third party modules loading.

 

[Marvin42s]

Yes, as whilst BSOD can have different causes, it's not often that someone has 2 causes present at the same time. Usually all the BSOD are occurring for the same reason, just appears in different ways (in most cases).

The fact that it has happened on boot would be more indicative of hardware, OS, or firmware as its prior to any third party modules loading.

I will test safe mode boot tomorrow. I updated the BIOS a week ago or so I think to the next version up, as I believe it improved support for 9th Gen Intel processors, although I didn't update to the absolute latest version as it didn't come across as necessary. I also installed a fresh version of Windows 10 on a formatted SSD when the system was built, and when I reinstalled Windows in an attempt to fix the crashes I once again formatted the SSD before reinstalling. The HDD, which only stores games, was formatted the first time for the new rig but not the second.

 

[Colif]

is CPU overclocked?
not many drivers at all running when WHEA happened so I have to guess it was at startup?

If windows still works, you could install the Gigabyte app centre and see if it has any newer drivers for board, this is unlikely to help the whea errors but might help the other 3 - https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Motherboard/Z390-AORUS-PRO-WIFI-rev-10/support#support-dl-utility

no sign of any overclocking software on motherboard website unless that is what Easy Tune is.

WHEA errors can be any hardware which makes them interesting.

 

[Marvin42s]

is CPU overclocked?
not many drivers at all running when WHEA happened so I have to guess it was at startup?

If windows still works, you could install the Gigabyte app centre and see if it has any newer drivers for board, this is unlikely to help the whea errors but might help the other 3 - https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Motherboard/Z390-AORUS-PRO-WIFI-rev-10/support#support-dl-utility

no sign of any overclocking software on motherboard website unless that is what Easy Tune is.

WHEA errors can be any hardware which makes them interesting.

Already installed most of the drivers from App Center, and most of these issues have occurred a few hours after boot.

The CPU had turbo technology turned on by default, but turning it off and bringing it back to default clock speed hasn't seemed to help anything.

 

[Marvin42s]

Yes, as whilst BSOD can have different causes, it's not often that someone has 2 causes present at the same time. Usually all the BSOD are occurring for the same reason, just appears in different ways (in most cases).

The fact that it has happened on boot would be more indicative of hardware, OS, or firmware as its prior to any third party modules loading.

Just used HD Sentinel to check the drives and both the SSD and HDD are perfect according to it. Does this mean it's likely a problem with the motherboard/ram/cpu/gpu?

 

[Colif]

SO if storage is old, and worked fine before, it shouldn't be problem

try running this on cpu - https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/19792/Intel-Processor-Diagnostic-Tool
run Prime95 as a 2nd opinion on CPU - https://www.mersenne.org/download/

Try running memtest86 on each of your ram sticks, one stick at a time, up to 4 passes. Only error count you want is 0, any higher could be cause of the BSOD. Remove/replace ram sticks with errors.