First off, I'd like to apologize for such a huge post after just being a lurker for years.
I've been trying to figure this out for over a month now. I've made multiple trips to Micro Center which is 3 hours away, I've been through four motherboards and seven fresh installs of Windows, among a whole bunch of other things I've tried. I just want to get my PC working properly. If you think you can help me out or have an idea of what's going on, please let me know.
Problem:
On Black Friday (November 24) I made the trip to Micro Center to buy parts for an upgrade. The goal was better streaming performance and just better performance overall. I got a Ryzen 5 1600, a Gigabyte AB350N Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard (ITX) and 8GB of dual channel Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000MHz memory. These replaced an FX-8320 CPU, an ASRock 970 Extreme3 R2.0 ATX motherboard, and 8GB of single channel Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3 1600MHZ memory, respectively. I don't do any overclocking, everything runs at stock.
I did the build the following weekend at my parents' house (my apartment is small) after waiting on my case to arrive from Newegg, and unfortunately it didn't post. I drove back to Micro Center and swapped out the board, got back to my parents' house, and booted into a fresh install of Windows. I got League of Legends and some other stuff installed just to see if everything was working fine, and after about an hour of running I went to bed.
The next day, after getting back to my apartment, I decided I'd stream to see how it did. I streamed Skyrim on my Switch for about an hour (using a capture card) before switching over to League of Legends. In the pre-game lobby for my first game, my League client froze up, and all my monitors went black for a few seconds. Here is a clip of it happening on my stream: https://clips.twitch.tv/FancyAlertTrayPogChamp
After they went black, all my monitors came back on, and everything appeared to work fine. However, I did noticed that my currently opened Chrome window, where I was monitoring Twitch Chat, looked weird. The top part of the window was translucent and had rounded corners, almost like it had reverted to the old Windows 7 Aero theme. (Note: this specific thing with Chrome has only happened once, it hasn't happened the rest of the times the system has frozen.) After this, it froze the same way two or three more times while I was streaming.
I spent most of the next day trying to figure out what was going on. I ran Furmark and Prime95 to stress test my hardware, and ran memtest to test my memory. All of these resulted in no issues. Thinking my Windows install could have had an issue, I reinstalled Windows on an entirely separate SSD and booted from that, but it didn't help. I made sure all my drivers were up to date, checked for Windows updates, checked my hardware and cables, reseated my memory, checked temperatures, and even tried a different power outlet. I even drove back to my parents' house to grab my old graphics card and power supply (an R7 260X and a Corsair CX550) and the issue still occured. It occurs seemingly at random times, but curiously, as I mentioned before, running Furmark and Prime95 for an extended period of time couldn't get it to freeze.
In the weeks since then, I've been on and off the phone with Micro Center's tech support, who have had me run more diagnostics, check my temperatures, update my BIOS, make sure memory settings are correct, reinstall drivers, reinstall Windows, try different hardware, different cables, different outlets, and a whole slew of other things. I made the trip back to the store again and checked it in for a full diagnostic. I left it with them over the weekend on December 9th, and on December 12th the technician called me saying he'd reinstalled Windows again, updated chipset drivers and had been running benchmarks all day, and there were no issues. I drove up the next night and got it, and as soon as I got it home the freezing started again.
I went back to Micro Center again and exchanged all the new parts I'd purchased for different ones. (Same parts, just swapped them out.) I built it in the store, took it to the Knowledge Bar, and we got it up and running and ran benchmarks again for about an hour. No issues there. At that point, there wasn't really anything else I could do in the store, so I took it home and plugged it in, and then it started happening again.
I called again and worked with a tech to make sure all my memory settings were correct. Each time I enabled XMP in my BIOS it wouldn't post at all, regardless of the settings. I booted it back up and decided I might as well reach out to Riot Games (League's developer) thinking that since it had crashed during a game, it might be a problem with League. Or, if League isn't having problems, maybe their log files could give me a clue as to what's going on.
I ran a few diagnostics including Riot's own diagnostic tool, and after uploading the logs, the tech read them through and told me he noticed Kernel errors, which leads him to believe it's an issue with Windows. (Kernel errors and stuff like that is a bit over my head.) I tried a few more benchmarks and some other stuff, and the issue didn't occur during any of those. So I continued looking for answers. I posted on Reddit, LTT forums, and a bunch of other places, but no one really knew what was going on.
A few people in an AMD community Discord server tried to help me figure out what's going on. I tried changing voltages and memory timings at their suggestion, but none of them helped. Additionally, we discovered that my board wasn't wanting to hold my memory clock speeds after booting into Windows. They recommended I try a different type of motherboard altogether, so on December 20th I made another trip to Micro Center and swapped out the Gigabyte board I'd been using for an ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming ITX board.
I got it home, booted it up, and didn't mess with any of my BIOS settings at first. It worked great for about 2 days before I headed home for Christmas. When I returned from the holiday, the issue started happening again. The first time I noticed it was Wednesday, December 27th. Yesterday, December 28th, it happened again. I decided to stream again to see if I could get it to happen repeatedly, and if so, I'd be able to see what it looked like on the stream, and whether it looked like the same issue or if it was slightly different. It didn't freeze while I streamed; I played a few games of League of Legends and the stream lasted about 2 hours. Shortly after I got done streaming, I decided to enable XMP and put my RAM at 2800MHz, which I've heard from a few people is a good speed to try if you're experiencing instability. It happened again shortly after starting a game of League.
So this is where I'm at. I haven't updated the BIOS on my new motherboard yet, and as far as I can tell, that's really my last hope. I'll do that after I get home from work today. I'll try a power outlet on the other side of my apartment as well; maybe there's something wrong with the circuit that the power outlets I've tried thus far are on. I'm not really sure. I feel like I'm out of options. If I can't find a solution before the return period on my parts is up (January 4th, 2018) I honestly am considering just taking the parts back to the store, getting my money back, reverting to my old system and just saving up to buy a pre-built system some day. That's not really my preferred course of action, but if I can't figure out why I'm still having this problem, it seems like the most practical.
I really hope someone comes across this post that can help me out, and thank you to everyone who does give it a shot.
For reference, here's my system configuration (after the upgrade):
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (stock)
Memory: 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX, DDR4 3000MHz
GPU: Sapphire R9 380 Nitro 4GB
Running Windows 10, latest version.
I've been trying to figure this out for over a month now. I've made multiple trips to Micro Center which is 3 hours away, I've been through four motherboards and seven fresh installs of Windows, among a whole bunch of other things I've tried. I just want to get my PC working properly. If you think you can help me out or have an idea of what's going on, please let me know.
Problem:
On Black Friday (November 24) I made the trip to Micro Center to buy parts for an upgrade. The goal was better streaming performance and just better performance overall. I got a Ryzen 5 1600, a Gigabyte AB350N Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard (ITX) and 8GB of dual channel Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000MHz memory. These replaced an FX-8320 CPU, an ASRock 970 Extreme3 R2.0 ATX motherboard, and 8GB of single channel Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3 1600MHZ memory, respectively. I don't do any overclocking, everything runs at stock.
I did the build the following weekend at my parents' house (my apartment is small) after waiting on my case to arrive from Newegg, and unfortunately it didn't post. I drove back to Micro Center and swapped out the board, got back to my parents' house, and booted into a fresh install of Windows. I got League of Legends and some other stuff installed just to see if everything was working fine, and after about an hour of running I went to bed.
The next day, after getting back to my apartment, I decided I'd stream to see how it did. I streamed Skyrim on my Switch for about an hour (using a capture card) before switching over to League of Legends. In the pre-game lobby for my first game, my League client froze up, and all my monitors went black for a few seconds. Here is a clip of it happening on my stream: https://clips.twitch.tv/FancyAlertTrayPogChamp
After they went black, all my monitors came back on, and everything appeared to work fine. However, I did noticed that my currently opened Chrome window, where I was monitoring Twitch Chat, looked weird. The top part of the window was translucent and had rounded corners, almost like it had reverted to the old Windows 7 Aero theme. (Note: this specific thing with Chrome has only happened once, it hasn't happened the rest of the times the system has frozen.) After this, it froze the same way two or three more times while I was streaming.
I spent most of the next day trying to figure out what was going on. I ran Furmark and Prime95 to stress test my hardware, and ran memtest to test my memory. All of these resulted in no issues. Thinking my Windows install could have had an issue, I reinstalled Windows on an entirely separate SSD and booted from that, but it didn't help. I made sure all my drivers were up to date, checked for Windows updates, checked my hardware and cables, reseated my memory, checked temperatures, and even tried a different power outlet. I even drove back to my parents' house to grab my old graphics card and power supply (an R7 260X and a Corsair CX550) and the issue still occured. It occurs seemingly at random times, but curiously, as I mentioned before, running Furmark and Prime95 for an extended period of time couldn't get it to freeze.
In the weeks since then, I've been on and off the phone with Micro Center's tech support, who have had me run more diagnostics, check my temperatures, update my BIOS, make sure memory settings are correct, reinstall drivers, reinstall Windows, try different hardware, different cables, different outlets, and a whole slew of other things. I made the trip back to the store again and checked it in for a full diagnostic. I left it with them over the weekend on December 9th, and on December 12th the technician called me saying he'd reinstalled Windows again, updated chipset drivers and had been running benchmarks all day, and there were no issues. I drove up the next night and got it, and as soon as I got it home the freezing started again.
I went back to Micro Center again and exchanged all the new parts I'd purchased for different ones. (Same parts, just swapped them out.) I built it in the store, took it to the Knowledge Bar, and we got it up and running and ran benchmarks again for about an hour. No issues there. At that point, there wasn't really anything else I could do in the store, so I took it home and plugged it in, and then it started happening again.
I called again and worked with a tech to make sure all my memory settings were correct. Each time I enabled XMP in my BIOS it wouldn't post at all, regardless of the settings. I booted it back up and decided I might as well reach out to Riot Games (League's developer) thinking that since it had crashed during a game, it might be a problem with League. Or, if League isn't having problems, maybe their log files could give me a clue as to what's going on.
I ran a few diagnostics including Riot's own diagnostic tool, and after uploading the logs, the tech read them through and told me he noticed Kernel errors, which leads him to believe it's an issue with Windows. (Kernel errors and stuff like that is a bit over my head.) I tried a few more benchmarks and some other stuff, and the issue didn't occur during any of those. So I continued looking for answers. I posted on Reddit, LTT forums, and a bunch of other places, but no one really knew what was going on.
A few people in an AMD community Discord server tried to help me figure out what's going on. I tried changing voltages and memory timings at their suggestion, but none of them helped. Additionally, we discovered that my board wasn't wanting to hold my memory clock speeds after booting into Windows. They recommended I try a different type of motherboard altogether, so on December 20th I made another trip to Micro Center and swapped out the Gigabyte board I'd been using for an ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming ITX board.
I got it home, booted it up, and didn't mess with any of my BIOS settings at first. It worked great for about 2 days before I headed home for Christmas. When I returned from the holiday, the issue started happening again. The first time I noticed it was Wednesday, December 27th. Yesterday, December 28th, it happened again. I decided to stream again to see if I could get it to happen repeatedly, and if so, I'd be able to see what it looked like on the stream, and whether it looked like the same issue or if it was slightly different. It didn't freeze while I streamed; I played a few games of League of Legends and the stream lasted about 2 hours. Shortly after I got done streaming, I decided to enable XMP and put my RAM at 2800MHz, which I've heard from a few people is a good speed to try if you're experiencing instability. It happened again shortly after starting a game of League.
So this is where I'm at. I haven't updated the BIOS on my new motherboard yet, and as far as I can tell, that's really my last hope. I'll do that after I get home from work today. I'll try a power outlet on the other side of my apartment as well; maybe there's something wrong with the circuit that the power outlets I've tried thus far are on. I'm not really sure. I feel like I'm out of options. If I can't find a solution before the return period on my parts is up (January 4th, 2018) I honestly am considering just taking the parts back to the store, getting my money back, reverting to my old system and just saving up to buy a pre-built system some day. That's not really my preferred course of action, but if I can't figure out why I'm still having this problem, it seems like the most practical.
I really hope someone comes across this post that can help me out, and thank you to everyone who does give it a shot.
For reference, here's my system configuration (after the upgrade):
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (stock)
Memory: 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX, DDR4 3000MHz
GPU: Sapphire R9 380 Nitro 4GB
Running Windows 10, latest version.
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