Hello again, so last time I left off I had learned that the previous PSU, a Coolmax ZU900 900W Bronze Certified was a highly unrecommended PSU for any system and I was told to return it immediately, I have done this and replaced the PSU with a new Corsair HX850 850W Gold Certified unit. I no longer receive power surges, however now I have a new problem, very frequent blue screens. Here's my rig before I go on:
CPU: AMD FX 8350 4.0Ghz
GPU: MSI Radeon R9 290 4GB
MOBO: Asus M5A78L-M/USB3
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 2X8GB 1866Mhz
PSU: Corsair HX850
Case: NZXT Phantom Full ATX w/ 3 200mm fans and 3 120mm fans
Drives: Samsung EVO 250GB, WD Black 3TB HDD, LG Blu-Ray Read/Write
So after getting rid of the Coolmax, I was told that my old PSU, a Corsair CX600M would be sufficient power to run my computer. However, after installing the unit, I randomly started receiving these blue screens pretty frequently. It could happen at any time, literally right after I booted Windows or 30 minutes after playing Civilization Beyond Earth on Ultra settings. So after having around 10 of these happen in a couple of days, I wiped my SSD and started fresh thinking it might be a Windows driver being corrupt from the power surge of the Coolmax. However this was not the case, after installing Windows and getting the essentials such as Firefox, AVG and the Catalyst drivers I started to see the crashes again.
As for the crashes, I do not see an actual blue screen(except once for some odd reason...) the screen usually just freezes, goes black and then reverts back to the BIOS and prompts me to load either in safe mode or boot normally. Another thing I've noticed is that when the Catalyst drivers are uninstalled, this issue goes away. I used my desktop for at least a couple of hours without any crashes, and then as soon as I reinstalled them and rebooted, not even 5 minutes in I received a system crash. After seeing this at least 5 more times, I downloaded a dump file reader, however it says the file causing the problem is "ntoskrnl.exe" which is a Windows NT Kernel file, not an AMD driver. I have no idea what this file does, so perhaps if someone is willing to give me some guidance, I can upload the dmp files in a zip folder(I have like 12) so that someone can analyze them. Alternatively, I can always upload some pictures using Imgur, whichever way is preferable.
Before I finish, I wanted to add a few things I've noticed as I've been trying to troubleshoot this issue:
-When I attempted to solve this issue before messing with hardware configurations, the GPU was dead silent as was the rest of my PC, then after "uninstalling" the graphics card from the device manager in Windows and restarting, it started spooling up fast on boot and then even faster when entering Windows, then eventually slowing down after a few minutes.
-This issue ONLY occurs when I have any Catalyst driver installed, I tried versions 13.12, 14.4 and 14.9.
-This crash can happen at ANY time, this issue will let me play games/watch videos for a random period of time before crashing, or it can simply crash after 10 seconds of loading Windows.
-Originally I thought this was a power supply issue, but I don't believe it is now, perhaps one of my components went bad after that power surge but I've yet to test them. I will be doing this as I receive answer.
CPU: AMD FX 8350 4.0Ghz
GPU: MSI Radeon R9 290 4GB
MOBO: Asus M5A78L-M/USB3
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 2X8GB 1866Mhz
PSU: Corsair HX850
Case: NZXT Phantom Full ATX w/ 3 200mm fans and 3 120mm fans
Drives: Samsung EVO 250GB, WD Black 3TB HDD, LG Blu-Ray Read/Write
So after getting rid of the Coolmax, I was told that my old PSU, a Corsair CX600M would be sufficient power to run my computer. However, after installing the unit, I randomly started receiving these blue screens pretty frequently. It could happen at any time, literally right after I booted Windows or 30 minutes after playing Civilization Beyond Earth on Ultra settings. So after having around 10 of these happen in a couple of days, I wiped my SSD and started fresh thinking it might be a Windows driver being corrupt from the power surge of the Coolmax. However this was not the case, after installing Windows and getting the essentials such as Firefox, AVG and the Catalyst drivers I started to see the crashes again.
As for the crashes, I do not see an actual blue screen(except once for some odd reason...) the screen usually just freezes, goes black and then reverts back to the BIOS and prompts me to load either in safe mode or boot normally. Another thing I've noticed is that when the Catalyst drivers are uninstalled, this issue goes away. I used my desktop for at least a couple of hours without any crashes, and then as soon as I reinstalled them and rebooted, not even 5 minutes in I received a system crash. After seeing this at least 5 more times, I downloaded a dump file reader, however it says the file causing the problem is "ntoskrnl.exe" which is a Windows NT Kernel file, not an AMD driver. I have no idea what this file does, so perhaps if someone is willing to give me some guidance, I can upload the dmp files in a zip folder(I have like 12) so that someone can analyze them. Alternatively, I can always upload some pictures using Imgur, whichever way is preferable.
Before I finish, I wanted to add a few things I've noticed as I've been trying to troubleshoot this issue:
-When I attempted to solve this issue before messing with hardware configurations, the GPU was dead silent as was the rest of my PC, then after "uninstalling" the graphics card from the device manager in Windows and restarting, it started spooling up fast on boot and then even faster when entering Windows, then eventually slowing down after a few minutes.
-This issue ONLY occurs when I have any Catalyst driver installed, I tried versions 13.12, 14.4 and 14.9.
-This crash can happen at ANY time, this issue will let me play games/watch videos for a random period of time before crashing, or it can simply crash after 10 seconds of loading Windows.
-Originally I thought this was a power supply issue, but I don't believe it is now, perhaps one of my components went bad after that power surge but I've yet to test them. I will be doing this as I receive answer.