Hey all, so I was going to buy someone's old desktop they built around 2016; he reset the OS and gave it to me to test out. The first problem was when I went to install a Realtek audio driver and it crashed on restart. I chalked this up to Windows Update messing something up while applying updates without me noticing (including trying to upgrade to 1903). From then on it would crash continually until I uninstalled the driver and rolled back the updates. It still had problems though, so eventually I just reinstalled the OS.
Up to this point, I had been assuming this was entirely a software issue, since there was evidently no instability before this, but then it crashed after I went to login post-reinstall. So now I am thinking hardware issue.
To test that, I tried memtest86. The results were that it never showed an "error", but would randomly freeze. I've included some photos of where it froze:
I couldn't see any pattern in how it froze. I thought maybe it had been jostled in the dude's car on the way to my place, so, not wanting to mess with the internals too much myself, the next day I asked him to come reseat stuff. After he did, memtest ran without problem for over an hour, getting to pass 2. But then it crashed. Running it again after that, it seemed to crash earlier the next time. Isolating the different RAM didn't seem to change anything. I considered maybe a temperature issue, given that it seemed to get a little better if you let it alone for a bit, but I've never seen the temperature go too high at any point. Here's some photos of it post-reseating stuff:
First two are the ones directly after reseating, last two are two I ran consecutively today.
Most of the time it's on CPU 0, but I think that's a result of how quickly it crashes, since I've tried different options for cpu in memtest, and none of them seemed to change things in a positive way. Should have documented that more, but in any case if there are specific options I should try I can try them.
So basically that's where I am at with this, and I'm not 100% on how to proceed. I'm worried it's maybe it's a cpu issue, but I've also heard of motherboard stuff causing issues with memtest. Let me know if there's any other information I can provide that would be helpful, and any advice on how to get more useful information here or ideas on the problem would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Here are the specs:
OS: Windows 10 Pro
OS Installed on: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 120GB
CPU: AMD FX9590
CPU Cooling: Corsair water cooling
GPU: AMD Radeon R9 290X Sapphire Tri-X
MOBO: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX
RAM: 16GB Crucial Ballistix Tactical DDR3-1866
PSU: Thermaltake Smart M850W 80 Plus Bronze
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Z
Up to this point, I had been assuming this was entirely a software issue, since there was evidently no instability before this, but then it crashed after I went to login post-reinstall. So now I am thinking hardware issue.
To test that, I tried memtest86. The results were that it never showed an "error", but would randomly freeze. I've included some photos of where it froze:
I couldn't see any pattern in how it froze. I thought maybe it had been jostled in the dude's car on the way to my place, so, not wanting to mess with the internals too much myself, the next day I asked him to come reseat stuff. After he did, memtest ran without problem for over an hour, getting to pass 2. But then it crashed. Running it again after that, it seemed to crash earlier the next time. Isolating the different RAM didn't seem to change anything. I considered maybe a temperature issue, given that it seemed to get a little better if you let it alone for a bit, but I've never seen the temperature go too high at any point. Here's some photos of it post-reseating stuff:
First two are the ones directly after reseating, last two are two I ran consecutively today.
Most of the time it's on CPU 0, but I think that's a result of how quickly it crashes, since I've tried different options for cpu in memtest, and none of them seemed to change things in a positive way. Should have documented that more, but in any case if there are specific options I should try I can try them.
So basically that's where I am at with this, and I'm not 100% on how to proceed. I'm worried it's maybe it's a cpu issue, but I've also heard of motherboard stuff causing issues with memtest. Let me know if there's any other information I can provide that would be helpful, and any advice on how to get more useful information here or ideas on the problem would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Here are the specs:
OS: Windows 10 Pro
OS Installed on: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 120GB
CPU: AMD FX9590
CPU Cooling: Corsair water cooling
GPU: AMD Radeon R9 290X Sapphire Tri-X
MOBO: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX
RAM: 16GB Crucial Ballistix Tactical DDR3-1866
PSU: Thermaltake Smart M850W 80 Plus Bronze
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Z
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