Build Advice Freezes, BSODs and clock_watchdog_timeout

Hello all,

Like many of you, I wear the 'they know about computers' badge with an equal amount of pride and dread. Today, in fact these past few days, are dread days.

Set up: Friend built a new pc for his kid. Actually did quite well apart from not plugging fans in. We've got:

MSI B450 Pro M2 mobo
Ryzen 3600 (stock hsf)
Corsair 16GB
Crucial P2 512GB NVME
Corsair 500W psu
Nvidia RTX2060
Fractal Define XL
Windows 10 Home

With the exception of the 2060 (for obvious reasons atm) everything else is new.

Problem: Windows will freeze after 5-20 minutes then bsod. It sometimes shows the error 'clock_watchdog_timeout' and sometimes doesn't. I can NOT for the life of me figure this out! So far I have

• Left it at the log in screen, system does not crash until logged in
• Updated the BIOS to the latest one
• Updated the SSD firmware to the latest
• Tried it with different memory
• Ran the 'mdsched' check (no errors)
• Installed Ubuntu to the ssd and ran a stress test (system was stable after 2 hours of 100% cpu and gpu load)
• Re-installed Windows after that
• Installed Windows to an old hard drive, system was still up after about 16 hours
• Installed latest nvidia drivers (when I got lucky with enough time)
• Tried to install other drivers, but I'm not a Windows user so I'm a little out of my depth here and the system crashes before I can get anywhere

Because of the bold points above I am fairly sure that it's a bad mix of Windows on that drive, but I'm at a loss for more than that. Tomorrow I'm going to try a different nvme drive but Ubuntu did work fine on the current one so I'm not hopeful. Most of the fixes online for the error message I get talk about BIOS updates (done) or rolling back drivers (n/a as it's a fresh install).

I've been at this on and off for a few days and some poor kid isn't getting to play Roblox and is doing homework this half term instead, can anyone suggest anything that might help please?

Thanks,
Jack

 

Have you tried Memtest86 for 4 passes?

 

What speed is the RAM? Ryzen can be a pain at speeds over 3200, so XMP isn't always set and forget.

It took a new BIOS release to finally get mine stable at 3600.

 

Try disabling C states in BIOS if you can, also have you got the latest chipset drivers (when you get lucky enough to install anything before the crash) ?

 

I wasn't able to get far enough in to install, but I've fixed it now anyway. Thank you for the suggestion.

Thank you as well! Also 3600, but xmp is off and the BIOS is the most up to date and working fine in Ubuntu. However...

Disabling C states (whatever they are) seemed to keep the system stable long enough to install all of the windows updates and drivers needed. It's now been on since about 8pm last night and running well!

Thanks again all of you!

If I may trouble you for one remaining problem though? I can't install the nvidia drivers! The card is just showing up as a 'windows display adapter'. The windows hardware thing shows that the driver is up to date, geforce experience says that it can't find the gpu, and directly downloading the drivers from nvidia returns a 'no suitable hardware found' error. How do I force it to see the card? I have tried disabling it in the windows hardware utility. It's been working fine before but I've reinstalled windows so many times I must have made a mistake somewhere.

 

Have you got the AMD chipset drivers installed - I doubt they'd effect it being able to identify the graphics, but you never know. Have you had the graphics card in a different PC to see if it will accept drivers ? It being the only second hand item, if you don't know its history could it be a dud ?

 

Just a heads up, you don't install Memtest86. You run it from a USB stick outside of Windows