The Random-Rebooting Mystery. Is it the GA-970A-UD3P motherboard?

barryjmorgan

Prominent
Jan 28, 2018
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My self-build (under 2 years old) has been randomly rebooting itself for several months - no blue screen, no error message, it reboots as if it had just been switched on for the first time. The frequency was low at first, maybe once a week, but it's been daily for a long time now.

It can happen after 5 hours or 5 minutes. I could be playing a game, watching a video in a web browser, clicking the Win button, doing literally nothing, already in the middle of a shut down, or having just rebooted itself and then immediately doing it again. It's seemingly random.

Having tried all sorts of fixes that made literally no difference (cleaning, resetting CPU, etc), I tore out a stick of RAM, halving it to just 4GB... and it stopped doing it. How weird!... But about 3 days later it rebooted, and it's started to get more common. Putting both sticks back now makes it worse.

My gut feeling from the start was that the motherboard has developed a fault, and that the RAM attached to it can affect the rebooting seems to me at least that this is correct.

So what do you think? Does this sound like mobo trouble to you?

I believe it is still under warranty with Aria.co.uk (although their customer service has not been good so far) and I don't want to get a new one and open up a can of worms with the OS.

SPECS

- Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P AMD Socket AM3+ Motherboard
- 2x 4GB Corsair Vengeance Jet Black 1866MHz CL9 DDR3 Dual/Quad Channel RAM
- AMD (Piledriver) FX-4300 3.80GHz (4.00GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 4-Core Processor
- MSI NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 2GH OC GDDR5 64 Bit Memory PCI Express Graphics Card
- Thermaltake TR2 Challenger 500W 80+ Certified APFC Power Supply
- 250GB Samsung 850 EVO Solid State Drive

[Further info: Temperatures are completely normal, I bought a new GPU so it's not that, the PSU is 80 Bronze certified, I've tried different power cords and wall outlets, MemTest found no RAM errors, I get no blue screens or software issues, I can absolutely gun the thing with games an applications and it copes fine.]

Many thanks for reading - I love this forum, it's helped me so much in the past too. x


 
Solution
Is it running W10?

Turn off fast startup in the Windows power options. My FX-8320 (+ GA-970A-UD3P - mine is a revision 1, as the system is quite old) would FREEZE completely randomly after the Fall creators update. Turned off fast startup and it never happened again.
Is it running W10?

Turn off fast startup in the Windows power options. My FX-8320 (+ GA-970A-UD3P - mine is a revision 1, as the system is quite old) would FREEZE completely randomly after the Fall creators update. Turned off fast startup and it never happened again.
 
Solution
(OP here, I think I posted this thread under a different email)

@dudeman509 I am on Win10 yes, I've unchecked that option now, we'll see if that makes a difference. Bear in mind though that my main issue is rebooting, not freezing.

 


Yes, that was what mine did, but I have seen others with reported reboots from the same thing with AMD systems. Hopefully it works out.
 


Fast start can causing rebooting, freezing and whatnot on older platforms. My pc with the asus p8z68v board and 2600k had this issue too where it couldn't shutdown due to that and would randomly lock up.
 
Very recent thing for mine; it's only happened since the last W10 update. I've tried reinstalling Windows completely, tried switching out drives because I thought the SSD was locking up, tried different RAM...finally, the fast startup thing worked for me (it has started just fine with that option since W10 released). I have no idea what they did with the creator's update, but 3/4 of my computers around had very strange unexplainable behavior from that before a complete Windows reinstall on 3 of them.
 
@dudeman509 @jaslion I appreciate the tip, but it hasn't made a difference I'm afraid. Believe me I would prefer it was an issue with Win10, something easy to blame, haha.

Since it only started rebooting 6 months ago and gradually became more frequent I'm still pretty sure it must be a hardware fault. Any other ideas?
 
It's looking like hardware then.

I also had a Phenom where some part of the CPU itself went bad and it would randomly just shut off.

There are several stress testing utilities like AIDA64, Prime95, Memtest x86 that *might* help you pinpoint what's causing it. Might not.