Question Spent one month troubleshooting. Random restarts stopped, but at what cost...?

[nenjiavero]

Hi, I'm new here so sorry if I'm breaking any rules.

Here are my specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
MBO: Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite
RAM: Ballistix 3600mhz CL16 DDR4
PSU: Seasonic M12 II Evo 620W
GPU: ASUS Strix 1070Ti
DSP: HP 27xq 2k 144hz 1ms freesync display, gsync compatible
Storage: 1x 1TB WD Blue HDD, 2x 256GB Samsung SSDs, 1x Crucial MX500 500gb SSD (System)

Now here's the deal: Random restarts. They happened every morning right after I turned the PC on. It would restart once, and then it's stable and all.
At first I thought XMP isn't right, so I turned that off, but the restarts kept happening.
After that, I took the time, and analyzed everything I could over the following three weeks, only to finally fix the problem by turning off Precision Boost Override in the BIOS.
I previously turned off C-state control and CSM, and entered the DDR latency values manually. The system has been stable ever since, and I haven't had any problems whatsoever.

What bugs me: Shouldn't everything just work out of the box? What did I lose by turning these settings off?
Is it pointing to something more serious (mobo or CPU faulty?)?

Should I be worried?




This is what I did before turning off PBO:

• Windows Event Logs: Nothing found except for the "Previous shutdown was unexpected" error
• BIOS downgrades, updates
• default settings, XMP On
• default settings, XMP Off
• 24/7 temperature monitoring: All good
• All hardware/physical connections, thermal paste etc.
• PSU: Works like a charm, checked by el. engineer
• Tried other PSU
• RAM: Tried with other memory, same thing keeps happening
• Installing system on new SSD with all other disks disconnected from board and PSU
• Stress Tests (Prime95, OCCT, Memtest, HD Tune) - no restarts
• Disconnected ALL devices (USB, audio, display, LAN)
• Thermal paste re-applied, CPU and cooler reseated
• Everything disconnected but CPU, MOBO, RAM and GPU
• Replaced all cables (Power, sata data, sata power)
• Manual RAM timings and voltage in BIOS
• XMP + manual voltage

 

[bg3]

I have a very similar system and problem !

AMD Ryzen 5 3600
MSI B550
GT1030
HyperX Fury DDR4 3600MHz 2x8gb
550W Corsair
1TB WD Blue NVMe

My problem is random restarts, but it never gets stable. At most it will stay on for 20-30 minutes the first time it's powered on, and it works fine as far as I can tell. But it can't even make it through an OS install. Then it will always restart when the display manager of the OS installer comes on . Then it will restart at the bootloader, then in BIOS. I've tried everything except different memory and different mobo. However, I just got a ASUS Prime B450 right now so I will update that.

(It's funny, I was reading another post on here about proper grounding when building a PC before installing the B450. So I wasn't even searching for info about this problem but I saw your post randomly in the sidebar.)

 

[cryoburner]

What bugs me: Shouldn't everything just work out of the box? What did I lose by turning these settings off?
Is it pointing to something more serious (mobo or CPU faulty?)?

"Precision Boost Overdrive" is a form of overclocking, running the CPU at slightly higher clocks than stock. In practice, the performance from enabling or disabling that should be imperceptible though, adding maybe a couple percent more CPU performance, at best. That's not to be confused with the regular "Precision Boost" (not Overdrive), which you would want enabled, as that's AMD's standard boosting feature.

As for the other settings, XMP tells the motherboard what clocks and latencies the RAM has been certified to run at. If you have the RAM's clock speed and timings all manually set exactly to the DDR4-3600 values that it was advertised to be capable of, then it should be running at the same settings as if the DDR4-3600 XMP profile were enabled. If you only set the clock rate and the CAS latency while ignoring the other sub-timings, then the motherboard might have defaulted to other values for those. RAM settings could make a little more of a performance difference than PBO, but probably nothing major unless the speeds were set relatively far off from where they should be.

C-states are a power management feature, and AMD recommends keeping them turned on (along with CPPC) for optimal performance. I think disabling C-states is something one would generally only do when manually overclocking. If disabling them didn't seem to fix your problem, but disabling PBO did, you might try re-enabling C-states and seeing if things remain stable.

If you want to verify that you didn't mess anything up with your settings that is significantly impacting performance, you might try running a system benchmark like UserBenchmark, and sharing a link to the results page here. That should indicate whether components like the RAM and CPU are performing roughly on par with the same hardware running on other people's systems...

Home - UserBenchmark

 

[nenjiavero]

@bg3 there should be an option in BIOS called "Power Idle" something or similar. It basically tells your PSU to take a breather when it's not needed (use low-performance mode if I'm not wrong).
Anyway, if your PSU is a bit older, and not a mid- or high-tier PSU, it may be causing this.


@cryoburner I've set XMP exactly as stated in the "SAFE" part of DRAM Calculator by 1usmus, and raised the voltage to 1.36, as that was stated as recommended. I'll try re-enabling C-states, just to make sure they didn't have any influence on the restarts.
I've done a bunch of stress- and performance-tests, and everything is stable now. I was just wondering if turning off PBO would mean loss of performance in some areas.

Anyways, in the end I have to say I suspect that something completely different has been causing the restarts: PSU Idle state. My PSU is a Season M12 II Evo 620W. It's a low-tier bronze PSU, and it doesn't support some of the modern things, such as the option to work in "low performance mode" when needed. I believe that this setting basically forced it to restart.

I'll try switching these settings on and off individually (without changing anything else), and hopefully be able to pinpoint the culprit after that

 

[bg3]

I have swapped out the B550 for the Asus B450 and everything works perfectly. I've been running for about 24 hours now and haven't had a single problem of any kind. I'm running all BIOS default settings. So, I'm going to return the MSI B550 because my unit is either defective or there is some incompatibility between Ryzen 5 3600 and the B550 chipset. Unless you want a B550-exclusive feature, a B450 will probably fix your issues. In any case it will eliminate a lot of troubleshooting.

 

[nenjiavero]

I turned on PBO, but left the power idle (or was it Power Load) option off, and haven't had any issues so far. I think that was causing my problems - the PSU not supporting the low-performance mode