Gaming PC Crashes at Random - LFC#217

[Music] hello interwebs welcome to our let's fix computers i have a custom build here which uh came in today uh apparently it is crashing and locking up in games and stuff like that um not a huge amount of feedback from the customer of exactly what was going wrong with this thing just that it was just crashing when gaming that kind of thing as you can see it started and booted up just fine so that's fine and dandy so before i go much further we're going to do a quick visual inspection on the inside and we're going to see if we can see any screaming faults that might be causing an issue then we'll go to the software and we'll see if there are any screaming faults that might be causing an issue and we'll move forward from there so let's go in a little bit closer here because there's a couple of things that i spotted while i was plugging it all in that i want to point out um so again just doing a tour around the cables we've got the reset button is in the wrong place that guy should be in there there we go that's not going to cause it to crash but still it was in the wrong place what is that spot even for that was that was in case intrusion so that's not going to do anything there oh well um let me see moving around as well i don't like this uh this is the rear fan cable and it's got a four pin molex lead that's just flapping around in the breeze that's 12 and 5 volt hot that that wire and the molex connector is rather exposed so i don't like that being there at all if you've bought a budget case that has come with one of these fans that has the um the three and put four pin um that has the molex tail on it just chop the tail off don't use it just chop it off we'll be doing that in a minute i'm just gonna lock that off no one uses molex for their fans you're always gonna be using three pin or four or four pin pwm so yeah that's not ideal i don't like this down here let me see if i can get you a good shot of that you see the eps connector looks kind of jammed in there um now it's the correct way around but just that just doesn't look happy i don't like the look of that at all again that might be a bad connection there one of those might not be improperly so we've got some just general scragginess on this i'm not sure if this is a i'm not sure if the customer built this machine um or whether this is an off-the-shelf thing from somewhere the spec looks okay we've got a cooler master 600 watt power supply that'll be fine um we're in an era cool case not one of their best ones in my opinion because um it's not very bad venting on this front panel however it's not using any fans up front anyway but nah and like you know this fan here this isn't screwed in properly and just yeah like that has gone in and it's gone solid but that's because the hole isn't tapped issued correctly and just there's little rough edges around this build and sometimes just lots of little rough edges like that might just be the gremlin in your system so that's not ideal um the rest of the system yeah looks okay motherboard is a b450mds3h i like this motherboard it's a it's a low end motherboard however i've never had an issue with a ds3h so no beef there uh it's a 1050 ti uh four gigabyte so the graphics card is modest but okay uh it looks like we've probably got 16 gigs of ram there yeah that's 16 gigs of 3200 ram so good ram no idea what cpu is under this cooler um so we'll find out what that is in just a moment so the first thing i'm going to do i'm going to log in and i'm going to try and reproduce the full so let's sign in so i've logged into the computer and i've plugged in my toolkit flash drive and what i'm going to do i'm going to stick on intel burn test and hardware monitor and we're just going to do a very quick sanity check so we'll fire up hardware monitor and just see what this looks like all right so that is uh a ryzen 5 2600x not bad and our package temperature is sitting at 40 the high 40s um at idle while it's chuntering away doing something in the background so let's fire up burning test and i'm just going to quickly hit this with a load oh god damn it guess i'll get net yes i'm aware that uh cinebench is a better way to load down a cpu however usually intel burning test is faster because i just copy it from the flash drive i don't have to install anything okay so our package power usage is spikes up by about 10 fold we're at 100 processor usage and our temperatures are rising steadily so we'll just see what this does i'm going to leave it to run for i don't know 10 or 15 cycles and just see where the temperatures go i'm expecting the temperatures to soar up to um that the 80s on this thing ah what oh intel burning test failed critical area your system was found to be unstable under intel burn test cool so apparently our temperatures only hit 76 degrees i say only 76 degrees is a little on the toasty side but that's entirely predictable for the setup we've got here uh horizon on its stock blower 76 degrees yeah that'll happen um so yeah however we actually didn't get through the intel burn test so something is up now we've achieved two things at this point um firstly we've seen that there is something going on but also we now have uh reproducibility uh what i'm gonna do now is i'm going to restart the computer and i'm going to run the same test again and that was one two three four five six seven cycles so i'm going to run that same test again and see if it can get further than seven cycles without it crashing um intel burn test should be able to run for as many times as you wanted to i've got it set to 100 cycles at the moment so if it can't get as far as seven then we've immediately found how to reproduce the problem and that is the key to being able to solve the problem is being able to reproduce it so let's restart and confirm that it got a lot further this time however again it has failed mid-test i'm not going to go through and count how many cycles it did however uh yeah we left it run i left it running for i don't know 20 minutes or so and it's conked out um yeah intel bernie it's been a long time since i've seen a computer that has failed to get through intel burning test normally you're doing this just to see what the temperatures are doing not as a stability test i don't consider intel burn test to be a stability test however as i say is a very quick just you know i have not installed anything i've just dragged hardware monitor and ibt onto the desktop run them and we have error messages so we've got a reproducible fault now it's time to start making changes to the computer so the first thing i'm going to do is we're going to shut this thing down and we're going to fix all those little things i don't like on it well the the fan and that eps connector that eps connector that is my current theory i don't like the look of that at all um so i'm going to settle that all out and then we'll go through and we'll run the same test again and we'll see if we get the same result and if that doesn't fix it the next stage will be to start running other tests to see if we can start narrowing it down other theories that are in my head at the moment or the next most prevalent theory would be memory issues and that could be an issue with xmp or and or perhaps bad modules so um uh what we're going to do we're going to straighten this out see if that fixes it if it doesn't i'm going to move on to doing some memory tests to see if any of those trip the system up as well because remember although although intel burn test is designed to stress the cpu um there's more going on with it and issues like memory issues will cause all kinds of problems throughout the entire system regardless of the test you're running you have to bear in mind that although a lot of tests are designed to stress specific components you can still get false positives as a result of other failures in the system for example uh with a if if it turns out to be a cpu issue then we might get issues running a graphics card stress test because a graphics card stress test is still going to put load on the cpu as well so this is where the this is where diagnostics turns into not so much uh run this run this run this run this it's more a matter of gathering information until you have enough uh enough flags to make an educated guess as to where your problem is so yeah uh let's shut this down and tidy this up so if you're watching this thinking oh man that loose cable that's not going to be the problem you might well be right however in diagnostics you've got to change one thing at a time and if you want to actually find out what the problem was it was anyway if we go in and we just chart start changing a whole bunch of stuff and we do a load of tests and stuff like that if we do too much in one go we won't know what was actually the issue which is bad because that means we can't make any preventative measures to stop it happening in the future so we're just gonna do things one step at a time well two steps at a time i'm gonna lock this guy down here off that's not gonna be our issue but i'm just gonna take it off anyway because it doesn't need to be there i'm currently just removing this back fan so i get better access to the eps connector oh am i going to have to take out the cpu oh there we go it's out okay we don't have a lot of slack on this which might be what caused the problem in the first place okay the connectors are not deformed that looks fine i think i'm just going to clip these guys back together again and put it back in okay that guy hasn't gone back together again in a very convincing manner but it has reconnected there we go all right there we go that just literally just went click into place now and that looks much tidier again i'm not giving you guys a great view of that however there you go as you can see that guy's nice and straight now that's that fan cable sorted out um i think that's about it i'm gonna put this fan back in and then we're gonna take the back side panel off as well just to make sure there's nothing going on there also i need to reverse this phone because this fan was in this way so it was blowing down into the case uh which is the wrong orientation it should be this way around so it's exhausting out the top of the case huh the hell oh oh that's fun right they so someone hacksawed off that corner to clear the eps connector i wonder if that's why the eps connector was all wonky because someone had been trying to wrestle that fan into place hmm all right is this just an unfortunate configuration of this case let me just see if i can fit that in uh yeah all right well that's the mystery solved of why this was like this in the first place hmm i'm not sure what to do about this would it clear if the cable was oriented differently yeah that just about works i've managed i've done a little bit of manhandling and we can get that to fit in it's not perfect but it's better than it was all right that'll do one fan and one eps connector that is not jammed into place fine let's take off the back cover and make sure there's no nasty surprises back here which is a mistake i've made in the past remember the corsair 220 t from christmas that made me look like a charlie because i didn't look in the back huh a dual connector eight pin fair enough right this is an enormous jumble in here i might do something about those cables um these cooler master power supplies are very noodly and they're very difficult to sort out um this is very difficult to actually fix i'm not surprised that has happened uh i i've fitted one of these before and had exactly the same issue like you you take it out the box and you're like oh that's easy i'll just unravel and untangle all of these cables until they're nice and ordered and neat and you when when you look at it you realize that you can't because they're all going through holes in each other like some kind of horrifying origami so yeah not surprised at that i'm not gonna i'm not gonna wail on them for that but we'll see if we can do something about it um apart from that though there's actually nothing wrong back here ah this is why i don't like molex connectors it's that hot i mean that's a ground pin so that's yeah that's been forced in i'll give you a gory close-up you can see where that pin has sort of been pushed right back down and forced into the connector there not ideal all right that seems okay yeah that's gone on all right that's sorted um so for those of you who don't know the molex pin out is 12005 so these two center pins these are zero volts or ground so that guy's sticking out that wouldn't have been causing any problems but hmm you never know okay i'm just gonna pull back some of these cables so the nice antec fans are look appear to be just molex only which makes me immeasurably sad because i actually thought these blue led antique fans looked quite nice however 12 volt molex only nah that's pretty bad oh i frickin hate molex connects you just gotta jiggle them until they go in there we go and it's okay to stack molex connectors like this it's only fans you may as well just put all of the horrifyingness in one place there we go all right that basically looks exactly as it did however at least i know that everything is plugged in now oh except to you what are you uh card reader let's make sure that is plugged in i don't think this was plugged in however i shall make it plugged in oh that's interesting not been causing a problem but just another thing i've spotted with this computer so here we've got the usb 3 front panel connector it comes here plugs into the usb 3 front panel header port and i noticed i had this little tail coming out and plugging into a usb 2 header i assumed that it was some kind of combo cable that was carrying a single usb 3 and a single usb 2 to the front panel however the front panel actually has dual usb 2 and one usb 3. so that guy there that's the dual usb 2 you can see that's going into a usb 2 header and it's got two rows of pins on it so what's this guy then this guy if you don't have a usb 3 front panel header then this tail is so you can plug the usb 3 port into a usb 2 header so basically this usb 3 port has been plugged into two headers on the board at the same time so i bet something very interesting happens if you try and plug something into the front usb 3 port basically that guy should not be plugged in at all i'm not going to chop that guy off because it's a bit of a thick boy cable i'll zip tie that back just so it's out of the way but now we've removed that we can plug in the uh front usb 2 card reader so i'll get that guy plugged in i can't do it at the moment because i've got all of my hands at the wrong angle to get the camera in there but yeah let's sort that out okay that's that all sorted out so we've sorted out the wiring enough anyway we haven't done cable pawn at the back but it's fine good let's turn it on and see if just sorting these little things out has done anything at all i'm not expecting it to have been this easy however as i say one thing at a time the first thing we've done is just sort out the cabling so if our problem disappears now then it means that one of those little gremlins that we just resolved was what was causing some instability in the system nope we are still kill so i'm not particularly surprised by that but that's fine now we know okay so as i said earlier on i'm going to move on to a memory stuff so the next thing i'm going to do um actually you know what i'm just going to switch off xmp yeah i'm going to turn off xmp let's reboot so i'm going to spam the delete key on the keyboard to go into bios on restart as soon as we hit the black screen anyway okay so xmp is a memory setting so technically any memory that's over 26 i think 2600 we'll call it um is classed as overclocked and these overclocking profiles are called xmp extreme memory profile [Music] and um uh this is something that needs to be switched on in bios to work and you buy your xmp memory switch on the xmp profile and it will and it will put in a predetermined overclock to get the memory up to the speed that it's designed to run at um however now and then xmp can cause problems very commonly on bad motherboards but it can happen so i'm going to turn that off disable so without xmp it's going to tank our memory speed down to 2133 which is just the default speed for ddr4 so let me go ahead and save that and we're going to run the test again um so again this is a long shot however xmp can sometimes cause problems so we're going to switch that off if it was an xmp issue i would expect blue screen errors um and in fact even if we had faulty memory i would expect blue screen errors so this problem in fact i don't think i even am going to run a memory test we're going to run this just as an interest thing but yeah um if we had memory issues i would ex i would expect blue screen errors we are winrar we got through all 100 passes so it looks like xmp is our culprit so i think what we'll do is we'll go for just a single pass so i'm going to switch on xmp we'll go for a fail then we'll turn it off again and we'll go for another pass what's the time i'm working late tonight for this one um yeah i got time that's going to take another hour yeah let's do it okay so while we wait for this test to run so just a reminder xmp is back on again so we're expecting it to fail this time it's probably going to take 10 or 15 minutes to do so though although sometimes it seems to fail after you know a couple of minutes anyway so what do we do if it is xmp because obviously our memory is now running down at 21.33 which is going to hurt performance quite a lot well not a huge amount however it could be knocking 10 or 15 fps off of the um game performance and depending on what game you're running that could be not really very much or it could be a lot you know if you're already sitting at 150 fps on a 60hz monitor that's not really going to matter however if you're trying to get that 60 frames a second out of a aaa game that's actually going to be hurting you quite a lot so what can we do about this the first thing i would recommend is a bios update on the motherboard which is probably what i will do on this because a newer bios which theoretically should improve things if nothing else it will have newer adjuster and stuff like that which is all of the amd software that they've put into the bios's and with a bit of luck gigabyte will have also done a little bit of work and a little bit of fine-tuning um and if nothing else it might just be enough just to tweak the way that memory is handled enough that xmp is actually working properly another way of solving this would be to manually dial in memory timings i have a video on this um i can't remember what it's titled but if you search my channel for xmp um then it'll come up with said video and in that video i demonstrate uh again xmb xmp causing issues ironically with a gigabyte motherboard again um and how you can use i've forgotten the name of the program about how you can use a utility to manually generate some safe xmp timing settings that are almost guaranteed to work and that are just a little bit more fetal than the xmp profile is it's a absolute ball late to do it however if you've got no other options that will probably make xmp work on a system that otherwise will not work another thing we could do is we could run this 3200 ram at 3000 or 3100 i would probably go and i would probably recommend going for 3 000 over 3100 because 3100 is a weird number but at any rate if we went for 3000 this would shave off a little bit of performance but probably not enough for node to notice and it would still put it almost a gigahertz higher than 2133 so obviously that is another point where we just we just down clock the memory ever so slightly to the point where the motherboard doesn't have an issue with it anymore so that's another option as well the other possibility is again is just bad memory it's probably worth my while running mem test on this anyway just to make sure it's not just straight up faulty ram and now we've actually proven that this is actually a memory related fault now all of a sudden i'm actually swinging back around to running mem test 86 so we'll run memtest86 on this as well uh once we've actually confirmed that this is an xmp issue um just to make sure that we don't actually have faulty ram i will run that memory test with xmp disabled um just so to make sure that we're looking for physical defects in the memory rather than just a squeaky xmp profile um so that's that another thing to discuss as well is uh what if um intel burn test had passed from the get-go and i'd come up and i'd drawn a blank on this what what then well i started off with intel burn test because um this is a really quick application to run i've got um i've got into a band test and a hardware monitor sitting on all of my flash drives it's part of my standard flash drive toolkit so when i'm looking for problems the first thing i'm going to do is just drag those two onto the desktop run both of them and just look at the numbers in hardware monitor and see if i can see anything that is clearly not right i'm looking for temperatures that are that are way out or um uh or clocks that are not clocking correctly um or just any kind of numbers that look wrong to me um and that is it's a lot faster to just run a hardware monitor and intel burning test than it is to start installing other utilities so if this had drawn a blank other utilities might include running cinebench r15 or cinebench r20 which again is a heavy cpu heavy benchmark we could also have run 3dmark time spy as a gaming benchmark or failing that we could also run um uh unigine heaven or unigen superposition as another gaming benchmark those again will run through 3dmark is a good one for catching out system instability because if it detects anything that's not quite right it will invalidate your score whereas um uh stress tests like heaven and superposition they might not crash then you might not see any visual issues whereas 3dmark is a good one to run because it'll actually invalidate the benchmark score if there's a problem the catch with 3dmark is that it takes forever to run if you don't have the premium version and if you do have the premium version well that costs money um so yeah and also all of these apps you know it takes time to install them so you when you want just some quick numbers on the screen not the best option which is why i went for in ibt first of all uh another good test that you can pull out is good old firmark um fermark is a good graphical stress test it barely scratches the cpu it just hits the gpu pretty hard not so good for top top-end graphics cards because it can't really max a top-end graphics card however low to medium and graphics cards no problem whatsoever so that's another good option to run and again fermark is very cool you've got to install it but it's very quick to install and it's very quick to get that up and running to get some load into the graphics card so those are the kinds of tests that i would have moved into next i would have started running those one by one perhaps even two at the same time like intel burn test and fermark at the same time just trying different things to see if we can catch the pc off guard and if we're really stuck you could even just ask the customer what games they play however in this case no no prizes for seeing that fortnite icon on the desktop i don't want to sit here and play fortnite to figure out what's wrong with that i don't play fortnite i don't know how to play it so yeah that's not an option i wanted to go down however thankfully we've got we have reproduction just on the first test i ran so that's great and uh it'll be good if we get a fail in um mem test as well that'll be interesting so in any case i'm going to walk away now and let this carry on running we're um we're getting into the test it's a shame we don't have a counter to see how far we've got to go but uh see you guys in a bit ah victory it failed again good right that's good enough for me it's clearly xmp um i'm not gonna do another test um we got a pass with xmp off and then it failed again when we switched xmp back on that's good enough so uh next up is men test as i mentioned we're going to run mem test on it and see if we've got faulty modules i don't think we have i think this is just purely an xmp issue however it'd be really dumb uh not to test the memory at this point um yeah okay so memtest86 um where do you get this from these days i haven't made a memphis 86 flash drive in a long time most of my most of my diagnostic flash drives i made years ago so yeah let me see google mem mem test 86 yeah it's memtest86.com and when you hit download that will download this handy little zip file and in there it's got an exe that'll make you your usb flash drive it's also got an uh an image file there so you could burn a cd if you're that kind of person still make it that way you will yeah so you can make your own flash drive um so yeah that's how you get mem test 86 let's run it funny i'm sure i've run mem test on horizon before but nah whatever okay right i am going to leave this to run um i'm not sure how long the current version takes to go because it's jumped up to 25 already on the first pass but we'll see i'll step away and leave that for a bit so uh the numbers we're looking for on this screen because i have had people ask before um so it's writing it's writing loads of data to memory and then verifying that it's correct and it's writing the memory in very specific patterns designed to catch out faulty modules um so for example you have like in this case this is moving inversions so it's putting it's putting opposing bits high and low directly next to each other so if you've got two high bits with a low bit in the middle on a faulty memory module having two highs on each side might just flip the one in the middle over to high as well which would be an error so it's deliberately writing invert an inversion of highs and lows across the memory and then it's checking to see if any of them have accidentally flipped onto the wrong position that's a very very generalized overview but that's the kind of thing that you're doing when you're testing memory there's lots of other things you do as well you can just write random garbage data and then read it back row hammering where you're just flashing the the memories on and off and things like that all kinds of things so yeah then in the middle of the screen it says pass one of four so on the modern version of mem test it will do four passes and then stop testing you can change that in the configuration if you want oh there we go ah oh xmp is still turned on okay we'll get to this in a sec as i was saying you can change the number of passes it will do in the configuration if you want it to run all night what we're looking for is the error counter so on the right says errors one we have actually hit an error so um yeah we actually have memory errors now because xmp is still on because i forgot to disable it before running this test this could be a false positive this doesn't mean our memory is faulty it just means we have memory issues this is just telling us what we already knew as the test goes on we'll probably see it clock up more errors however any errors at all are a fail this is not a case of oh it's just one error any errors are a fail there is no glancing blow with this there is no oh yeah it'll be fine one error means it's failed um quite often if you have a faulty module it'll start clocking up tens hundreds or thousands of errors so this is very minor but fail as well okay let's quit out of this because um yeah it's failed there is no point in running the test any further escape that's the wrong keyboard so i'm going to switch off xmp and i'm going to run the same test again ah well i'm actually going to change tactic because i tell you what's going to happen i'm going to turn off xmp and the memory is going to pass that is exactly what's going to happen i'm going straight in with the bios update because that is my that's my goal for actually fixing this problem is a bios update so i'm going to jump i'm going to try and save myself some time and jump ahead we're going to do the bios update and then we're going to run the test again once again with xmp turned on because if we get a pass with xmp on then that means we win so time for bios update what version we got at the moment uh bios version f50 bios date 27th of the 11th 19th oh this is quite a new bios uh-oh let's see if there's a newer one so this is a b450 ds3h oh so bs uh b450m ds3h yep support bios yeah this is already on the newest bios uh-oh okay well that's scope of the bios update plan um we could drop it to a lower bios however i really don't think that's going to help us okay let's do a test let's drop the memory to xmp 3000 and run mem test again and see if that gets through because if that passes then this is just a bad i don't know i want to say it's just a bad matchup is this memory on the qvl list that's another thing we can check i'm going to go over to cpu support support list that's what i want we have a summit ridge cpu which is the ryzen 2000 series okay right what memory is this cmk16 gx 4m2 b3 uh so the memory kit that's in this computer is not officially supported by the motherboard now this is something that i never check for when i'm building computers for the record i never bother checking qvls but this is a perfect example of how you can get caught up arguably at this point we can't blame this on the motherboard because the motherboard never claimed to support this memory is there actually 3200 memory on the support list yeah right at the top here um there's an eight gigabyte kit so it's very close so yeah that's probably our issue though um i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna drop the memory to three thousand that's probably going to work and honestly i think that's going to be my recommendation moving forward for now so let's go memory settings and i'm just going to change the system memory module multiply it down to 30. right let's save that and i'm gonna f12 for the boot menu again we're 24 minutes into the test and the error has not reappeared um so yeah at this point i'm satisfied that running at 3 000 seems to have solved our issue um so we've got a choice now um it's i'm gonna kick it out like this um basically uh what i'm gonna do now it's late in the evening i'm gonna leave this running overnight come in tomorrow morning and confirm that it got through all four passes and then if it got through all four passes i'm going to send this i'm going to send this pc on its way um well actually no i lie i'm going to defrag the hard drive and then send it on its way because that hard drive was heckin fragmented um obviously on a sensible build this would have an ssd in it and that wouldn't be an issue but yeah whatever um so what other options have we got well you could i'm sure if we drill through that qvl list there'll be a 16 gig memory kit uh well no actually there were no 16 gig 3200 memory kits that were on the qvl list this is just a low end motherboard that's trying to run ha i don't want to say high end components but mid-range and pushing components you know um i mean it's not it's not super exotic memory i don't know this is one of the reasons why i've kind of fallen out of love with gigabyte i've just seen a bit too much of this with gigabyte in the past year or so um i had sort of gone all in with gigabyte after having a bad time with msi who are my old flame but i'm kind of flipped around again but that much being said uh msi have not been perfect either they have they're in they have an inconsistent track record so it might just be worth just going all in and just saying you know what just spend a bit extra and buy an asus but whatever it depends on your build i'm not going to get into the debate of which motherboard brand is the best right now it depends there's no straight answer to that it depends what you're building it depends on the budget it depends on what's going in it what it's going to do etc etc um at any rate i'm going to kick this out at xmp because that has solved our problem uh if you have a problem similar to this and you're like no i bought 3200 ram i wanted to run a bloody 3200 well in that case check out my other video i'll stick a card in there uh the links to it and i'll put a link in the description down below as well the links to my other video about xmp issues that explores a very similar problem to this and the hard way of solving it which involves dialing in custom memory timings that are just a little bit more lacks or just a little bit more refined that will probably get i mean if i did custom memory timings on this we'd probably get it back up to 3200 without any errors but i don't want to do that on a customer pc because mainly if this bios gets reset for whatever reason then a page of custom memory timings will need to be re-entered again whereas at the moment if the bios gets reset for whatever reason then i can just say to the customer you go into the bios you turn on xmp and you set the multiplier to 30 that's it and you're not gonna spot the difference between 3000 and 3200 like it's going to be a couple of fps maybe maybe and most of the time it'll probably be in the margin of error so suffice to say we're just going to run this ram at 3000 and it'll be fine so that's it thank you very much for tuning in everyone i will see you all in the next video bye for now you

Channel: Adamant IT

Views: 280,404

Rating: 4.8941073 out of 5

Keywords: adamant it, adamantit, computer, repair, shop, custom, gaming, modding

Id: azSHDgznHRI

Length: 42min 30sec (2550 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2020