I'm pretty basic-level tech, but I've been building my own rigs for 15 years or so and have never had anything close to this level of problems. I'm about ready to pull out my glorious, luxurious locks over this thing.
"Old" build (from 6th months ago):
ASRock B250 Pro4
Pentium G4560
2 X 8GB Team Vulcan DDR4 2400
EVGA GTX 1050 Ti
OCZ ZS Series 650 PSU (prolly 5 years old from an older build)
Ran fine since I built it in June. A few weeks ago it froze in the middle of playing a game and wouldn't reboot. Re-seated components, etc, and got it to boot sporadically. I thought I had it narrowed down to a bad RAM stick, since it would boot with one stick solo in any DIMM slot but wouldn't boot with the other stick in any slot or in dual channel. But it also wouldn't boot with the GPU in it (but would with another, old GPU I had lying around). Someone convinced me it was the crappy mobo, so I ordered a
MSI z270 Gaming M3
to replace it. Installed it and confirmed the bad RAM stick; the two sticks acted the same way: one worked fine solo in any slot and the other didn't work at all. The GPU did work fine on this mobo. So I replaced the RAM with a kit of
2 x 8GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000.
Everything ran fine for a couple of days until I enabled XMP since the RAM was only clocking 2133. Crashes within 5 minutes of starting a game. Getting pretty stressed out here. I ran memtest on the new RAM and it threw something like 1300 errors in the first few minutes before freezing. I disabled XMP and pulled one of the sticks to run memtest on a single stick. Made four passes with zero errors.
Here's where things go really bad: I moved the single stick to another DIMM slot to see if maybe one of my (brand new) DIMM slots was failing. As soon as I cranked the machine, smoke and burning smell. I pulled the stick and it's clearly scorched in a couple of spots, as is the DIMM slot. I'm still not sure what happened, but I'm guessing I probably didn't seat the stick properly or maybe some dust got in there. Who knows?
The other stick still seems to be working, as I'm typing this post on the machine right now with that stick in a different DIMM slot. But I still never solved my original problem since I was still getting crashes with the brand new mobo and RAM even before I burned it. And now I'm out a $200 mem kit and possibly the mobo as well.
So, questions:
1) Any idea what the original problem was? CPU memory controller, maybe? The GPU? (ugh). I'm at a loss at this point.
2) I really don't want to do this because money, but should I scrap the whole thing and start a new build from scratch? I'm getting pretty fed up at this point. Or is there a chance I can salvage this thing with some more, non-scorched RAM and maybe a new CPU? If this board still runs with a burned out DIMM slot, I can just not use that one.
3) Any chance of me getting an RMA on either the RAM (from Amazon) or the mobo (from Newegg), do you think?
4) Could I have damaged the GPU as well?
5) Any other advice/suggestions/derision?
Thanks in advance! Hope you're having a merrier Christmas than me!!
"Old" build (from 6th months ago):
ASRock B250 Pro4
Pentium G4560
2 X 8GB Team Vulcan DDR4 2400
EVGA GTX 1050 Ti
OCZ ZS Series 650 PSU (prolly 5 years old from an older build)
Ran fine since I built it in June. A few weeks ago it froze in the middle of playing a game and wouldn't reboot. Re-seated components, etc, and got it to boot sporadically. I thought I had it narrowed down to a bad RAM stick, since it would boot with one stick solo in any DIMM slot but wouldn't boot with the other stick in any slot or in dual channel. But it also wouldn't boot with the GPU in it (but would with another, old GPU I had lying around). Someone convinced me it was the crappy mobo, so I ordered a
MSI z270 Gaming M3
to replace it. Installed it and confirmed the bad RAM stick; the two sticks acted the same way: one worked fine solo in any slot and the other didn't work at all. The GPU did work fine on this mobo. So I replaced the RAM with a kit of
2 x 8GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000.
Everything ran fine for a couple of days until I enabled XMP since the RAM was only clocking 2133. Crashes within 5 minutes of starting a game. Getting pretty stressed out here. I ran memtest on the new RAM and it threw something like 1300 errors in the first few minutes before freezing. I disabled XMP and pulled one of the sticks to run memtest on a single stick. Made four passes with zero errors.
Here's where things go really bad: I moved the single stick to another DIMM slot to see if maybe one of my (brand new) DIMM slots was failing. As soon as I cranked the machine, smoke and burning smell. I pulled the stick and it's clearly scorched in a couple of spots, as is the DIMM slot. I'm still not sure what happened, but I'm guessing I probably didn't seat the stick properly or maybe some dust got in there. Who knows?
The other stick still seems to be working, as I'm typing this post on the machine right now with that stick in a different DIMM slot. But I still never solved my original problem since I was still getting crashes with the brand new mobo and RAM even before I burned it. And now I'm out a $200 mem kit and possibly the mobo as well.
So, questions:
1) Any idea what the original problem was? CPU memory controller, maybe? The GPU? (ugh). I'm at a loss at this point.
2) I really don't want to do this because money, but should I scrap the whole thing and start a new build from scratch? I'm getting pretty fed up at this point. Or is there a chance I can salvage this thing with some more, non-scorched RAM and maybe a new CPU? If this board still runs with a burned out DIMM slot, I can just not use that one.
3) Any chance of me getting an RMA on either the RAM (from Amazon) or the mobo (from Newegg), do you think?
4) Could I have damaged the GPU as well?
5) Any other advice/suggestions/derision?
Thanks in advance! Hope you're having a merrier Christmas than me!!
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