Rebooting/hard freezing problems out of Windows on first built PC

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Kurrus

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Jan 27, 2012
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Hi. I very recently built my first PC. Its specs are:

Case - Fractal Design Core 1300 Series Micro ATX
PSU - Seasonic M12ii-620 EVO
Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H
CPU - Intel Core i7-4790K 4GHz
RAM - Kingston HyperX Fury 16GB 1600MHz
GPU - EVGA GeForce GTX970 SC ACX 2.0
Storage - Crucial MX100 256 GB SSD, 2xHGST Deskstar 4TB internal HDDs

The first PSU that I tried (Cooler Master G750M) was DOA. Once I had the Seasonic installed, the computer finally booted. Windows 7 installed successfully, but in the screen that asks you to name the computer the machine shut down and got stuck on an endless reboot loop that didn't get to the BIOS. I let it reboot several times before I interrupted the startup sequence and left it sitting there for a few minutes.

Afterwards I started it up and successfully reached the BIOS. First thing I noticed was that the rear fan wasn't spinning, but the frontal and CPU fans were. The CPU was sitting at 45º C at first, then slowly climbed to 53º C. Soon afterwards everything froze; the keyboard and mouse lost power but the computer was still being powered (only inoperative) and feeding the monitor a stuck image. I have not turned the computer back on in fear of damaging components.

What is more likely to be the culprit here? I've asked a few friends and the consensus is that either the CPU, the RAM or the mobo is at fault, the latter being the most favored option. Are these symptoms indicative of a bad mobo? What are the recommended steps to troubleshoot this?
 
Solution
20salmon


run memtest86 to test your RAM (http://www.memtest.org/). Do this with your healty backup RAM as well (but make sure they work on your motherboard). If the healthy ones are compatible and it still crashes then...
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20salmon

20salmon

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Jun 23, 2013
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Sounds like a bad motherboard to me. Try booting with only 1 RAM stick first, if the same problem occurs, return the motherboard and try to avoid Gigabyte, it's by definitely the most problematic brand for motherboards.
 
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K

Kurrus

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Update on things.

Booting with 1 stick seems to have fixed this issue as the computer has been running for close to 2 hours with Windows updating in the background and some reboots here and there. Still, I won't consider this over yet.

Can a mismatched dual channel setup cause the issues I was having? I remember placing the two sticks on matching color slots, as essentially everyone told me to do. However, upon reading the mobo manual in detail I noticed that Channel A corresponds to slots 1 and 3 while Channel B corresponds to 2 and 4. The slots are numbered 4, 2, 3 and 1 (left to right) on the motherboard itself, with alternating colors, meaning that each channel has one slot of each color. If a bad dual channel setup can trigger BSODs and lockups that might be the explanation.
 
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20salmon

20salmon

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Jun 23, 2013
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Yeah that's most likely your culprit. Try again with both RAM sticks connected according to the manual.
 
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K

Kurrus

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Jan 27, 2012
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Another update.

Actually got another BSOD while installing Windows updates running only 1 stick of RAM. The screen went away too fast for me to see, but the kernel dump reports MEMORY_MANAGEMENT again. This happened after 2+ hours of use.

I swapped the stick and changed its location to slot 4. I'll be doing more testing and seeing if I get any more BSODs. If I do, I'll install four spare sticks I have that are entirely healthy. Failing that, I can probably rule out RAM being faulty and do something about the motherboard.
 
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20salmon

20salmon

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Jun 23, 2013
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run memtest86 to test your RAM (http://www.memtest.org/). Do this with your healty backup RAM as well (but make sure they work on your motherboard). If the healthy ones are compatible and it still crashes then return the motherboard.

 
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Solution
K

Kurrus

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Jan 27, 2012
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Unfortunately, because it came from a prebuilt PC, all I know about this healthy RAM is that it's DDR3. Clock speed is almost certainly 1333 or 1600 MHz. Can RAM whose DDR type and clock speed match a motherboard's still be incompatible?
 
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K

Kurrus

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Tested the lone stick on slot 4 for a whole day. No BSODs. I installed another set of 2 sticks on slots 4 and 2 and am testing this configuration currently. Bizarrely, Speccy reports 16 GB in single channel, running at 800 MHz, even though I loaded the RAM's XMP profile in the BIOS and saw its speed listed as 1600MHz.

Regardless of which one is right, things seem stable for now, and that's enough for the time being.
 
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Rashiu

Rashiu

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The first thing I would do is to flash update my BIOS, to ensure that it has all the fixes toward compability problems and issues like your ram sticks. Just to be sure it's not the firmware thats making the problem
 
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K

Kurrus

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Jan 27, 2012
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Last update on things.

Speccy listed single-channel mode because I absentmindedly installed the RAM in single-channel mode. It took just a few minutes to fix that, however, and after a couple days running continuously there have been absolutely no stability issues using this set. Therefore, I'm going to assume it was that one bad stick of RAM causing me trouble.

Problem solved. Thank you all for your help.
 
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