Question X570-Pro + Ryzen 7 5800X "soft locks"

grin_king

Distinguished
May 10, 2011
12
0
18,510
Hi guys,

I started getting hard boots, even at idle, on my system a few months back. Kind of ignored it, as it wasn't affecting me TOO heavily... then it started to annoy me. Found a reference in event viewer to a CPU core issue.

Researched it, found it was a common issue with my combo, and that a firmware update for the BIOS would lkely sort it. That does in fact seem to have been the case.

However, since then, I am getting "soft locks" within windows - mostly whilst I am not actively using it, thankfully. But it's weird one I've not seen before:

The clock stops updating, anything "active" on the machine also stops updating - Task Manager, Resource Manager etc. are all either empty if I manage to load them up, if I have any scripts running, they simply stop running and sit where they were when the lock happened.

I can still move open windows around, and minimise/resize them. But the Task bar is non-responsive, and I am unable to reboot the PC gracefully (ctrl-alt-del usually works, but it doesn't actually reboot if I select that option).

I've looked at my RAM, because I noticed when I was in the BIOS that it was only running @ 2133, even though it's PC3200 RAM. (https://www.corsair.com/uk/en/Categ...RGB-Black/p/CMW64GX4M2E3200C16#tab-tech-specs). And reading up on that, there are issues with clock speeds etc. for PC3200... so am unsure if THAT might be the problem... or if it's simply running slower than it could be.

I've never (intentionally) OC'd the machine, but I did note whilst going through the BIOS that some of the options there would allow it to kick on a bit if need be (sorry, can't for the life of me recall the options involved), so I've tried disabling those from their "auto" setting they were on, with no discernible impact on the problem.

Any thoughts on what might be going on here?? Am rapidly approaching the point where I might refresh my Windows install, just to be sure... but honestly, I don't think that's going to help. Really doesn't seem like an OS/software problem to me.

Cheers,
Bob.
 

grin_king

Distinguished
May 10, 2011
12
0
18,510
I believe I may have found it, after additional trawling through the gazillions of discussions on it around the place. For me, it seems as though disabling the "C-State Control" in my BIOS has fixed it. So far, 2 days running without issue - when prior to that, i'd easily have a dozen or more freezes/day if my machine was sitting idle. Have also now taken the step of pushing my RAM speed back up to PC3200 instead of the default 2133 - which made quite the difference to my userbenchmark scores!