- Jan 24, 2018
- 1
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Problems, persisting over the past year or so
(sorry for the long read)
My PC was built with all new parts, apart from my RAM and SSD which were gotten for free from a friend. The RAM is kingston branded and the SSD was manufactured by Samsung, so I believed that they were of good quality. These were both the first things to get suspected when problems started occurring.
Longest problem:
When using Chrome, Edge, or a web browser in game (through steam for example), or even when ingame and an advertisement is being streamed in the background (CS:GO community servers for example), my PC would lock up and freeze for half a minute to 5 minutes. Pressing/Spamming CTRL ALT+Delete would have no impact other than landing me in the ctrl alt delete menu once the PC has unfrozen. Having task manager open before a freeze to monitor resources gave me no information due to data not being recorded during the freeze for me to see. In Chrome I also see a “waiting for cache” error while everything was frozen (clearing cache/cookies in chrome does not help). This has been the prominent error the entire time I have had my PC.
The second problem (about 5 months later):
When ingame (any game doesn't matter) after a while of playing my FPS would drop from 150-300 to 30, consistently. After searching for problems, I downloaded a hardware monitor program (forgotten the name, red logo with a lighting bolt if it matters) and found that my VRM(s) were hitting 102 Degrees, and my system was aggressively thermal throttling to combat this. Because I was using a liquid cooler with no fan near the CPU, the VRMs were obviously not getting enough air flow and overheating. I ended up Zip-Tying one of my front cooling fans to the top of the case pointed towards the CPU socket, and that fixed the issue. (Ghetto, I know, but it worked). That is why the front fan is disconnected and lying down inside the case temporarily.
Recent issues:
I decided to complete a fresh install of windows to clear out old programs and such that I wasn't using. It all went smoothly, and all programs were installed perfectly fine. About a week later however, my computer started going through “attempted recovery” in the BIOS and wouldn't boot into windows. After disconnecting all other drives and forcing the PC to boot into the SSD, I had a blue windows screen telling me to attempt repair or reinstall. Repair didn't work, and after giving up and trying to reinstall, I got an immediate error then also. I created new bootable media on a USB stick only to find that when I booted into the USB drive I had the exact same problems as before(with no options working). In a last ditch effort I formatted the SSD drive with another computer and installed a fresh copy of windows again and all the software justa as before. This is the OS that is on the PC now.
What caused me to flip:
Multiple software problems and the consistent crashing have drove me up the wall.
Performance in CPU intensive games such as Planetside 2 has been underwhelming. GTA V (which is a very RAM intensive application) has suddenly stopped working(it worked perfectly before the fresh installs of win10), Discord closes and crashes along with spotify and I get an “exception breakpoint” error (presumably with gta V but no way to find out what it is for)
After brute forcing the applications to close with task manager, my display and cursor have been lagging and freezing for a split second randomly, as well as windows that I have been dragging around. I have to restart to fix. (Not my mouse having a problem, tested on another pc) This is even more noticeable due to the fact that I have a 144hz monitor.
I tried to narrow down the problem by replacing my RAM with a new, better 8gb DDR3 HyperX RAM stick temporarily from my brothers PC(1866MHz so it is faster than mine) but my system wouldn't even post with that RAM installed.
I have tried CCleaner and defraggler on my hard disks to no avail. Various scans and other software have not detected problems or fixed them.
Random info
-My pc has two monitors, a 60Hz panel stacked above a 144hz AOC panel
-Has a wired Ethernet connection, a CAT 6A cable connecting directly to the router. (Streaming should not be a problem due to 200+ mbps download speeds)
-CPU cores have been unparked, amd “Cool’n’quiet” has been disabled in the BIOS and “high performance computing” mode has been enabled there too.
-BullGuard antivirus has been installed the entire time.
Future upgrade plans were a ryzen 1500X and 8GB DDR4 and a new motherboard, hoping that it would fix the problems that I am having and also give me better performance. But since the possibility of the problems being with my SSD arose I have decided to find out the problem properly first.
(sorry for the long read)
My PC was built with all new parts, apart from my RAM and SSD which were gotten for free from a friend. The RAM is kingston branded and the SSD was manufactured by Samsung, so I believed that they were of good quality. These were both the first things to get suspected when problems started occurring.
Longest problem:
When using Chrome, Edge, or a web browser in game (through steam for example), or even when ingame and an advertisement is being streamed in the background (CS:GO community servers for example), my PC would lock up and freeze for half a minute to 5 minutes. Pressing/Spamming CTRL ALT+Delete would have no impact other than landing me in the ctrl alt delete menu once the PC has unfrozen. Having task manager open before a freeze to monitor resources gave me no information due to data not being recorded during the freeze for me to see. In Chrome I also see a “waiting for cache” error while everything was frozen (clearing cache/cookies in chrome does not help). This has been the prominent error the entire time I have had my PC.
The second problem (about 5 months later):
When ingame (any game doesn't matter) after a while of playing my FPS would drop from 150-300 to 30, consistently. After searching for problems, I downloaded a hardware monitor program (forgotten the name, red logo with a lighting bolt if it matters) and found that my VRM(s) were hitting 102 Degrees, and my system was aggressively thermal throttling to combat this. Because I was using a liquid cooler with no fan near the CPU, the VRMs were obviously not getting enough air flow and overheating. I ended up Zip-Tying one of my front cooling fans to the top of the case pointed towards the CPU socket, and that fixed the issue. (Ghetto, I know, but it worked). That is why the front fan is disconnected and lying down inside the case temporarily.
Recent issues:
I decided to complete a fresh install of windows to clear out old programs and such that I wasn't using. It all went smoothly, and all programs were installed perfectly fine. About a week later however, my computer started going through “attempted recovery” in the BIOS and wouldn't boot into windows. After disconnecting all other drives and forcing the PC to boot into the SSD, I had a blue windows screen telling me to attempt repair or reinstall. Repair didn't work, and after giving up and trying to reinstall, I got an immediate error then also. I created new bootable media on a USB stick only to find that when I booted into the USB drive I had the exact same problems as before(with no options working). In a last ditch effort I formatted the SSD drive with another computer and installed a fresh copy of windows again and all the software justa as before. This is the OS that is on the PC now.
What caused me to flip:
Multiple software problems and the consistent crashing have drove me up the wall.
Performance in CPU intensive games such as Planetside 2 has been underwhelming. GTA V (which is a very RAM intensive application) has suddenly stopped working(it worked perfectly before the fresh installs of win10), Discord closes and crashes along with spotify and I get an “exception breakpoint” error (presumably with gta V but no way to find out what it is for)
After brute forcing the applications to close with task manager, my display and cursor have been lagging and freezing for a split second randomly, as well as windows that I have been dragging around. I have to restart to fix. (Not my mouse having a problem, tested on another pc) This is even more noticeable due to the fact that I have a 144hz monitor.
I tried to narrow down the problem by replacing my RAM with a new, better 8gb DDR3 HyperX RAM stick temporarily from my brothers PC(1866MHz so it is faster than mine) but my system wouldn't even post with that RAM installed.
I have tried CCleaner and defraggler on my hard disks to no avail. Various scans and other software have not detected problems or fixed them.
Random info
-My pc has two monitors, a 60Hz panel stacked above a 144hz AOC panel
-Has a wired Ethernet connection, a CAT 6A cable connecting directly to the router. (Streaming should not be a problem due to 200+ mbps download speeds)
-CPU cores have been unparked, amd “Cool’n’quiet” has been disabled in the BIOS and “high performance computing” mode has been enabled there too.
-BullGuard antivirus has been installed the entire time.
Future upgrade plans were a ryzen 1500X and 8GB DDR4 and a new motherboard, hoping that it would fix the problems that I am having and also give me better performance. But since the possibility of the problems being with my SSD arose I have decided to find out the problem properly first.
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