New Ryzen Build Freezing @ Idle

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frizzlebyte

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Mar 21, 2013
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First, my specs:

Motherboard: ASROCK AB350 Pro4 with BIOS v3.00
RAM: Kingston HyperX 8GBx2 DDR4 @ 2400 Mhz
CPU: AMD Ryzen 1600
GPU: Originally a Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 (from old system), now an EVGA Nvidia 1060 3GB
PSU: EVGA 850 G2
HD: Toshiba 3TB SATA 7200 RPM drive
OS: Windows 10, fully updated

This system was built at the end of May to replace a four year-old system that had developed a nasty reboot problem that I finally traced to the motherboard.

Now, for the problem description.

The new system had been fine when I first built it, but after the first couple weeks, I noticed that the new system would reboot and I'd find a crashdump with an error indicating that a CPU cache error had occurred. About a week ago, I was playing HITMAN(tm) and the image became corrupted, the system became unresponsive, and the screen would go black. This would also happen loading back into Windows, and stay that way. I traced this to the video card, because I could run the system in safe mode, uninstall the drivers, and it would display video again, but not after reinstalling the drivers.

So, I replaced the video card, thinking that it was faulty, as it was a four-year-old carryover from the old system. The video has been fine so far, but I'm still left with another problem: when the system is idling, sometimes I'll come back to it to find that the mouse and keyboard are unresponsive. I have to reset the system, and then everything seems to be working again, until a few days later, when I come back to a previously-fine system and the thing is locked up again. There are no other obvious signs of problems. No crashdumps, nothing other than the kernel-power error in the Event Viewer logs to show for it. Not even a "fatal hardware error" like I was getting before replacing the video card.

I've tried stress-testing the CPU with Prime95, I've tested the RAM with MemTest 86+ for more than ten passes a couple times now (before the video card died on me, during the "Cache Error" crashdump phase of this saga. The RAM even seems to pass the bit-hammering test, which my other computer didn't), and all my voltages and temps look fine, nothing stands out as obviously problematic. I also tested the FMA3 bug just to see if that could be the issue, and it passed that, as well.

The freezing only seems to happen during idle, when I'm not doing anything with the system, so I'm at a loss here. I've basically been dealing with a crapped-out system for what seems like forever, first the old system and now this new one, and I need someone else's opinion. Could this be a Windows bug, or the joys of being a Ryzen early-adopter, or do I have a faulty component somewhere? God forbid it's the CPU. :-\

Any help with this would be absolutely, greatly appreciated, because I'm out of (affordable) ideas here.
 
Solution
jmrnilsson
I had a similar issue it turned out to be a driver/kernel issue. My GeForce GTX 460 1GB work just fine on Intel but on AM4 it froze on heavy GPU load. Almost seemed like it tries to apply some thermal throttling, fails and freezes instead. As far as I know thermal throttling did not exist back when it was released ~2011.
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frizzlebyte

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I actually uninstalled the latest drivers because I suspected the Ryzen Plan to be the issue. Been using the High Performance Plan since then, after a format and reinstall of Windows 10. Same problem, though it *seems* to happen a bit less than it did, but that might be in my head. Not sure.

EDIT: That is to say that I uninstalled the latest drivers and *reinstalled* the ones that came on the motherboard CD.
 
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frizzlebyte

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Okay, I've installed the new drivers and activated the power plan, scanned the drive, and checked dxdiag. No errors were found in either the scan or dxdiag. Just for the record, I've also disabled idle time optimization in Norton, Windows defragging, and I've also turned off PCIe Link State Management and USB Selective Suspend in the power options.

Basically, now I'm just crossing my fingers hoping that this works. May take a couple days or so to know for sure, since the freezing has been erratic at best. I'll post back when I know something, or if things seem stable for a while. Thanks for your continued help with this, elbert. Appreciate it!
 
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frizzlebyte

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Looks like it's still doing it. Based on readouts in the event viewer, the system seems to have stopped creating entries around 11:43PM local time. When I came back to it after a couple hours, it was locked up. No hard drive activity, I even unplugged and reseated my USB mouse and keyboard to see if maybe it had just turned off the ports, but no, the system itself was locked up completely.

The only thing I changed in the past day was to have the monitor (plugged into HDMI) turn off after a certain time limit. I've never had any problems with this before, but could that have something to do with it? I'm tempted to say no, because it has locked up a couple times with that setting off. I know for a fact that hibernation and standby are not enabled at all, by the way.

Any ideas as to likely culprits with a problem like this? There are no hardware errors or anything that I can see in the logs.
 
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frizzlebyte

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Just a quick follow-up: I reseated the RAM and video card as you suggested back on the 5th, and also disabled Cool N Quiet in the BIOS and unhooked one intake fan from the motherboard header that I added about a month after building the PC, before the freezes started.

I haven't had a freeze since then, so now I'm going back through and redoing each of them one-by-one to see if the freeze returns. If it turns out that it is either the case fan or Cool N Quiet, what could cause instability in either of those cases?

Thanks again for your help!
 
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frizzlebyte

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My system's been rock-solid the past few weeks, even after re-enabling Cool n Quiet, so I've narrowed it down to being either the addition of the case fan (which I'm going to reattach and see if the issue returns) or badly seated RAM.
 
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frizzlebyte

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Soooo, the day before I was going to reattach the fan, my PC froze up after leaving it alone for a couple hours. No idea what the issue might be, honestly. I mean, it's probably a hardware issue, but as for narrowing it down through testing, that'd be a pain since it can be a month or longer between freezes.

The system works great other than this, so if anyone has any ideas, I'm all for hearing them. Otherwise, I'm at a loss.
 
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frizzlebyte

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I myself have suspected that could be happening, so I'll have to look into that more, probably. It fits the symptoms my system is experiencing, for sure.
 
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jmrnilsson

jmrnilsson

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I had a similar issue it turned out to be a driver/kernel issue. My GeForce GTX 460 1GB work just fine on Intel but on AM4 it froze on heavy GPU load. Almost seemed like it tries to apply some thermal throttling, fails and freezes instead. As far as I know thermal throttling did not exist back when it was released ~2011.
 
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vatsg2144

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Hey m8, have the same cpu mb combo as u, just curious, which bioa version are you on? Mine was 3.10, it will hang frequently, but when i look into asrock's forum, i found that their board had a problem with FMA3 code. So i updated to 3.30,which the latest, so far i have no problem. So maybe u wanna try that!
 
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frizzlebyte

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Hey, thanks for commenting. The first thing I did back when this problem first appeared was update the bios to version 3.00 (recent enough to fix the FMA3 problem), but this didn't help my situation. However, after jmrnilsson's suggestion that it might be an undervolting issue, I disabled AMD Cool N' Quiet, as it dynamically changes the CPU voltage to save energy during idle. Since then, I've not had any hard lockups.
 
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vatsg2144

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Ok i actually disabled cool n quiet, fresh copy of windows, stock frequency and voltage for both cpu and ram, my psu was beefy enough for the whole build. But in bios v3.0 im still getting hangs, so maybe anyone can provide other suggestions for me pls? :(
 
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samuel.p.evans

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Jan 14, 2018
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Getting similar issues here mate. Any luck? Mine doesn't even need to be idle. Just switches off after 10 minutes of very light (if any) tasks. It actually lasted 4 hours playing cities skylines. Playing the game actually helped it! Yet when I stress tested it I'm lucky if my CPU can last 2 minutes before screen blank, no input (including power button) but PC looks like it's still running. Very strange and at my wit's end! Please help if you've found a solution. Thank you
 
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cykamancer

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Apr 15, 2015
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I'm having same problem with my ryzen 1600. did u find a solution to it? Thanks
 
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samuel.p.evans

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It was really weird. I took it to an IT guy who took it apart and then tested all pieces individually. They all worked fine. He thinks the heatsink was on too tight or it was a Windows problem after he did a fresh Windows reboot. Otherwise it just kind of fixed itself?!
 
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cykamancer

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That's nice.. So you didn't have any problem since that day?
 
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samuel.p.evans

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No man. I've had 1 time that the screen froze on a game so I had to do a hard reboot and another time after a Windows update where it went super slow until I restarted it and it was fine. Otherwise, after playing numerous games more than 500+ times (meaning system off/on and playing games), games that are demanding too. It's been fine, thank God!

P.S. my CPU fan is a Noctua DH15-SE and it was a bit of a pain putting it on the CPU. So if it's the same cooler then try putting it on again, you won't need to reapply the thermal paste as it'll already be spread. Otherwise, try a full Windows refresh. I installed AI Suite and I had issues ever since that install, so I think that was the problem. But that's the difficulty, you never really know.

Best of luck mate. I hope it works out
 
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frizzlebyte

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It seems my problems have gotten better, maybe stopped altogether, with BIOS version 5.00. I don't know about 5.1, haven't tried it.

Only thing is, there's no guarantee an update won't cause other problems for you, but a BIOS update might help the freezing.
 
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cykamancer

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That's good to know :)
 
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