Daventh

I recently installed a program called FanControl and since then I started to notice that my CPU is always boosting and seems to never go idle, it used to get it's voltage lower than 1V before when at idle and it's clockspeed (in task manager) changed according to workload and temps were around 35°C and 40°C at idle, now it's always at 1.35V or so, 4.2Ghz and 55-60°C idle with a score in Cinebench R23 about 1000 points lower than before and very stuttery in games like Borderlands 3 and God of War. Tried changing windows power plans, update BIOS, disable PBO, clear CMOs and delete the fancontrol files but didn't work. My specs: OS: Windows 10 x64 21H2 Motherboard: MSI B450 Tomahawk BIOS: 7C02v1E, AMD Cool n' Quiet enabled in BIOS CPU: Ryzen 5 3600, stock settings GPU: Gigabyte Gaming OC RTX 3070Ti, stock RAM: 16GB (8x2) 3200Mhz Crucial Ballistix, AXMP profile 1 Drives: 1TB SX8200 Pro, 1TB Crucial MX500, 2TB Toshiba HDD Power Supply: Seasonic Focus Plus 650W 80+Gold

He says that it doesn't make any noise at all so I presume that it isn't spinning, I find it strange that it shows up at all in Disk Manager though.

Ok got into the TestDisk site and noticed it has a Windows version, is there a difference if I use a Wndows version instead of Linux and also if run from a bootable drive or from the OS?

Well, what seems to have fixed the freezing was buying a mid-tower case with 4 case fans pre-installed + another fan he bought, connected through MOLEX so I guess they run at 100% all the time and temps are much more reasonable now, but what improved the performance drastically was installing Windows 10, now instead of playing at around 20-30 fps, the games run close to or at 60 and without stuttering, even Monster Hunter, so I guess it was Windows after all.

Tried on 2 different PCs, doesn't freeze them anymore, it simply doesn't show up in windows explorer or turn on now. Also the drive is still in warranty so he isn't too enthusiastic about opening it.

Sorry I got no experience at all with Linux, do you mean runnin Linux through the usb drive?

So a friend got a Seagate STEA1000400 External HDD from Amazon and backup his data in it to re-install the OS, the drive lasted about 2 and a half days until he plugged it and froze the PC, rebooted and now the drive doesn't show in windows explorer when connected and on device manager it shows as unassigned and uninitialized, also the led on the drive doesn't turn on, is this drive dead? and if so, can something be done to recover the data? (other than costly data recovery services)

Hard to tell if it's Windows but it wouldn't hurt to try given that Windows 7 is going out soon anyway, might as well update to Windows 10; Well the GPU had increased usage during the play session so I guess it was being used, also Monster Hunter has a VRAM usage meter that changed depending on the GPU installed, And no, the monitor was plugged into the GPU.

Sorry it took a while, took a big fan (around 25cm in diameter) and pointed it at an angle at the components with the side panel off, temps seemed to be fine at around 40°C in both CPU and GPU I checked with AMD Overdrive and MSI Afterburner, also no freezes, got a random BSoD while playing Dark Souls 3 but I was not able to replicate it and performance on that game was greatly improved, to around 60 fps from 15 without the fan, it would take a few minutes for the fps to increase though. Monster Hunter World on the other hand... it would not completely freeze the PC, it would get a single freeze for a few seconds and then run normally again, thing is, performance with or without fan or without the GPU was pretty much the same at around 20 fps with stuttering, even tried with an R9 380 2GB and a different power supply, an EVGA SuperNova NEX 750W Gold, performance would not improve but at least would not freeze, however, a while back i watched a gameplay of Monster Hunter with the same CPU on a 570 and a 1050Ti and in said video it would run at around 40fps, and even if it did not run at like that on this system, I don't quite understand why having a GPU doesn't have an effect on performance.

Yes the next step is to check the CPU and GPU behaviour with msi afterburner to see clocks, usage, temps, i also read that since its a mining card it can do some weird stuff under these kind of conditions. But since its a friend's PC, we havent gotten around to getting a better cooling yet, will update our findings once we test it. But I keep thinking its heat, with the side panel off it didn't freeze but the game (Monster Hunter World) ran extremely poorly, Skyrim's performance improved as well frame times, I asume it was able to throttle very hard with that extra airflow.

thanks for your answer, will try out the big fan test, I read online that HWinfo is not very reliable when reading APUs temps, so I used AMD OverDrive instead which shows the delta to max temperature, when gaming the CPU would reach around 5°C from max and probably hit 0 when freezes but i got no way to be sure, without the GPU installed it would sit around 14-11°C from max, but it still is weird to me that it hard freezes instead of throttling or just crashing the game.

The PC seems to run fine without the GPU installed, but when it is installed it can run games for some time before completely freezing up, also performance increases but not by much, the time it takes for the system to freeze depends on how demanding the game is, happens with the latest drivers installed, the case is a no-name brand, has no fans, its a small case for a Micro-ATX motherboard, in case the culprit is heat causing the APU to freeze (as I suspect). System Specs: CPU: AMD APU A8-7600 CPU Cooler: Stock cooler. Motherboard: Gigabyte F2A68HM-H RAM 8GB DDR3 (2x4GB) GPU: Asus RX 470 4GB Mining PSU: Aerocool Cylon 500W Full Range 80+ Bronze OS: Windows 7 Professional 64bits

Yeah, think it's the same as GT but without RGB for half the price, yes please would like to see a review of it.

It seems like the Wraith Stealth is not good enough or something is wrong in my setup, i get 60-75C in gaming but 95C (causing the CPU to throttle) under all core workloads, looking for a 45 or less cooler, can stretch it to 50 but my budget is very tight, and 165mm tall as a maximum. Been looking at a deepcool gammaxx gt, hyper 212 black edition and a Scythe Mugen 5, but i cant find a definite answer to which will perform better, dont care much about noise or RGB just that temps improve.

Ok I built my first system and it runs great unless i enable the XMP profile in the BIOS, if I do, it crashes after some minutes of running an intensive task like 3D rendering or playing games; I tried clearing the CMOs and then: enable XMP profile, set DRAM Voltage to 1.35V, and the first 4 timings to 16-18-18-18-36 (what is advertised as the XMP profile timings), still get WHEA, someone suggested I might have a faulty RAM stick and to run memtest64, so I did, ran it for half an hour and didn't get any errors (with XMP disabled), did I do something wrong with the test or the OC? System Specs: Motherboard: B450 Tomahawk. CPU: Ryzen 5 3600. RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 1x8GB 3200 Mhz PSU: Seasonic Focus+ Gold 650W HDD: Toshiba P300 2TB