A wonderful rainy morning to all! Having some issues with my main build that I'm hoping someone can shed some light on - it's a bit of an "old faithful", i7-2700K, Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z, 16GB 1866MHz DDR3, 2x980Tis, Corsair H80i, 750W XFX PSU, Win7 x64. It's not long been rebuilt and has Kryonaut on the CPU, I'm pretty confident this has been pasted properly as it's been running fine for ages, both before and after I had to strip and rebuild it. I realise it's an ageing spec but it does what I need it to (for now). However, it has bizarrely started losing its time sync, which means I have to regularly update the internet clock manually. It also used to idle ~35C @ 4.6GHz. The other day, it crashed out of my Company of Heroes game (grr!), which I chalked up to the joys of playing on PC, but then yesterday it did it again twice, hanging the system in the process. After a hard restart, I thought I'd stick something non-taxing on like Pac Man to see if that made any difference, but it hung there as well after about an hour. Hard restart, uninstalled CoH, reinstalled to find out it had lost all my campaign progress (clearly no Steam cloud save then) and transferring my copied out save file back into the CoH folder made no difference, so fkg cheers for that, Relic/Steam. Anyway, that's incidental. Reloaded CoH, hung again. Hard restart, can't remember what I tried next but it BSOD'd with an 0x0124 error. Have spent all night trying to figure out what this means and it may be a hardware error, apparently, either CPU or motherboard. Have booted up this morning and knocked the o/c back to 4.4 in the BIOS, but couldn't sync the clock as usual. Also couldn't load a browser, so checked the connection and it was saying the ethernet cable wasn't connected, even though it had the green traffic light flashing on the plug at the router. The board has two ethernet sockets so swapped a new lead into the second socket and it's now working. Loaded Core Temp and it seems to be sitting at 62C, drawing 20W, 18% RAM usage, 0-2% load and anywhere from 1.9-3.1GHz (with the occasional flash up to 4.4 for whatever reason). I'm doing nothing other than typing this post into Edge. Nothing else is running (apart from whatever it's doing in the background) other than the usual AV stuff. This is clearly too high, I've not seen it do this before and I've no idea why it would do it all of a sudden. I don't have a new board I can easily swap out for at the moment and need to be getting on with some work, so I'll probably just remove the o/c altogether for now, but does this seem like the board is failing, or something else? Additionally, I've noticed the sound output has deteriorated over the last week or so - gets crackly, drops out, interference, volume has decreased. Have tested the audio kit with another PC and it's fine, so it's definitely the output from this board (first thought was driver-related). I also noticed it refused to restore the screen from blank the other day when I switched between it and another box using the KVM switch, which also necessitated a hard restart - not sure if this is relevant. Looking in the event viewer shows some red around Schannel 70/80 events (??) but it's tricky trying to pin things down exactly, due to the time being out of sync now and again. I did update the Geforce Experience driver yesterday, but can't see that this would be causing all the above (especially the temps). Event viewer shows nothing else red/yellow around the times I've needed to do a reset (indicated by the "last shutdown was unexpected" startup entries) other than the Schannel stuff. There is a yellow mention of the Intel Gigabit Network Switch (poss e1 cexpress corruption), so for now I'll assume this is causing this morning's issue. Given the above, can anyone advise: - what might be causing all this? Board or CPU - how to tell? - will a Win reinstall likely fix this? I'm doubtful... - if it is board/CPU, why would they suddenly start faffing about like this? - could it potentially be a failing cooler and if so, is the only way to check to swap it out, or is there some diagnostic I can run? These are the only thoughts I could come up with, other than swapping out one piece at a time with max faff. But the main question: - if it's a lost cause, what's the best upgrade path I've got? I can do either first or second hand, would prefer to keep as much of the existing kit as possible to keep costs down, but won't get too hung up on it. New and second hand suggestions both welcome! I'm thinking it should only be board/CPU/RAM that's required if going new and have seen that some places sell bundles. I'm out of the loop on the newer AMD/Intel chipsets, PC usage is gaming and music in Ableton, bit of light workload ie. no rendering or other heavy stuff (although Ableton is pretty resource-hungry). I may add a sound card at a later stage but for now I run through a Cambridge Audio USB DAC, so onboard sound should be good, but not earth-shattering and micro-ATX is probably the minimum size I can use (think it's E-ATX at the moment). Also happy to wait for any new releases if going down that route (or pick up second hand once the serial upgraders start ditching stuff). Think that's it - could really do with ridding my life of unnecessary tech issues right now, so any suggestions gratefully received! Cheers all EDIT: After a bit more messing about this morning trying to reduce the o/c, it now sits at socket 51C and CPU 60C in the UEFI, so something is broken. I'll try swapping the cooler to test that, but I'd still be interested to hear upgrade thoughts.
Still have to test the cooler this weekend, but in the meantime I had a poke around and found the following (all new), plus I can re-use my existing GPUs and cooler (assuming it still works): Ryzen 5 3600X £190ish MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus £150ish 32Gb Adata Gammix 3000MHz £120ish How does that compare to what's trendy/available at the moment? Any changes I should make?
Losing time sync, have you replaced the CMOS battery ? Cooler may have an airlock or something, but if it's as old as the machine, it might not be a bad idea to replace anyway. Maybe the thermal paste has gone off and needs replaced ? (cheap and easy to try). When it's running, check the pump on the cooler is running. You may be able to hear it ... also check fans on radiator are working and touch the water pipes when it's been running a while, normally one pipe will feel a bit warmer than than the other. Schannel faults (a quick google says) relates to Symantec Management Engine ... Personally I'd dump symantec ANYTHING from the PC if you can. To be honest, if you can I'd wait and see what AMD reveal on Oct 8th, may be a new generation of chips this month. If nothing else, it may move the 3600 price down (probably not now that I've said it LOL), But if you have to get now - I'd probably counter your suggestions with Ryzen 3600 (non - X) - £190 ish - the X seems to be about £210 MSI B450 Tomahawk Max - £100 Some 3600C18 (C18 seems to be the slightly slower/cheaper ) RAM £120 +
Apologies, bud - I forgot to thank you for the above suggestions - much appreciated. For reference, I replaced the CMOS battery and it appears to be keeping time so far (touch wood). I also swapped the cooler out and that seems to have solved that issue; installing it into a different box gave the same result - 60+C in the UEFI, so I assume that cooler is shot. Moving it from one box to the other should have shaken any bubbles loose, so maybe it's just had its day. Sound issue has managed to reproduce (again) and I'm having issues with the drivers so need a different solution, but other than that, going to keep the same kit for now. Job done - cheers!
CMOS batteries have a lot for which to answer! I wonder if the pump in the H80 has gone for a ball of chalk. A new cooler will see you right, as you say - that's still a reasonable spec machine
Yup as soon as there's a time sync issue on an older bit of kit it's time to swap the cmos battery, they do die.
Yeah, man - the little 'uns and I maxed out the monitor at 150fps on Overcooked at the weekend! In seriousness, I did manage ~90fps on 1440p Squadrons with everything turned up and about the same or more on Battlefront II. It's been ages since I've had it up and running and gaming properly (usually have issues of one form or another with this damn thing) so I'm a happy camper now (touch wood). I don't tend to play the latest titles anyway, so I reckon this will keep me going for some time yet. I also tested the sound on another install disk in the same box and the problem reproduced, so it's not a driver issue (I don't think); transplanting the USB DAC in works, so it must be something to do with either the board or the audio socket. CBA to waste more time on it so I'll just use the DAC and try to regain the lost 50+ hrs in CoH... It's always one of the last things I think of, too! Jinq-sea's right - a lot of blame rests squarely at the feet of those silver coins. I have another box I need to get up and running that I couldn't even get to POST before, so that's going to be the first thing I do with that one. I'll probably yell for help on here with whatever inevitable subsequent issue(s) I experience when rebuilding it...
I spent hours before I tried that on one rig years ago. Another one was a duff sata cable... In one way it's infuriating, in another it's a relief to find out it's not an expensive problem
