windows 10 New PC - strange Windows freezes (probable cause: NZXT CAM)

[Dark-vash]

27 minutes ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all,

I'm Jeff, the product manager for CAM.

 

Hi Jeff, it's nice to see someone from the brand noticing consumers and try to help in any way possible. I was in contact with NZXT support, but since yesterday, it seems my ticket disappeared. it's not even closed. it just vanished from my requests. I think the ticket number was 825571.

 

Thank you.

 

EDIT: I managed to record the freeze I'm experiencing. 

 

 

[RxNOOB]

1 hour ago, Dark-vash said:

 

Hi Jeff, it's nice to see someone from the brand noticing consumers and try to help in any way possible. I was in contact with NZXT support, but since yesterday, it seems my ticket disappeared. it's not even closed. it just vanished from my requests. I think the ticket number was 825571.

 

Thank you.

 

EDIT: I managed to record the freeze I'm experiencing. 

 

 

I have the same issue like you and I didn’t think that It was CAM that was the primary issue. Since then I’ve RMA my MOBO, RAM and PROC and SOLD off my OLD GPU (tho maybe it was too old) currently waiting for my 2080S to arrive and assemble it. The only thing left for me to RMA is my HP EX950 M2.SSD. Since maybe it’s the issue with cam I guess I’ll just use the system without CAM once I got my GPU. 
 

I was a hassle and I never think it was CAM cause i was building a new PC. So much hassle and time wasted 

[jakecar91]

9 minutes ago, RxNOOB said:

I have the same issue like you and I didn’t think that It was CAM that was the primary issue. Since then I’ve RMA my MOBO, RAM and PROC and SOLD off my OLD GPU (tho maybe it was too old) currently waiting for my 2080S to arrive and assemble it. The only thing left for me to RMA is my HP EX950 M2.SSD. Since maybe it’s the issue with cam I guess I’ll just use the system without CAM once I got my GPU. 
 

I was a hassle and I never think it was CAM cause i was building a new PC. So much hassle and time wasted 

It is most definitely CAM. I had my computer built and was using all the same components, and then decided to step up my cooler fan, to the Z63 AIO from NZXT. As soon as I downloaded the CAM software and initiated it to adjust settings, all was fine. Then I played a game through blizzard.net, immediately locked up and I had to hard reset. This happened about 30 more times with the EVENT VIEWER only showing ID 41, so the software doesn't report to windows. I would use collaborate during school with this CAM Software running, the same incident occurs. This is a CAM issue, and they most definitely fell short. Nice to see the manager respond to the thread, but I have since, received an E-mail from the NZXT company asking for sensitive data in my file explorer that correlates with the software, funny thing is, it was never a problem with the stock cooler AMD provided. 

[BurntToasters]

2 hours ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all,

I'm Jeff, the product manager for CAM. I've been reading through this thread and there seem to be several issues that have similar symptoms. Some of these issues have been resolved, but some clearly still exist. Because CAM supports millions of software and hardware configurations, all of which call on a different combination of drivers and software components to power the behaviors we offer, it can be difficult for us to guarantee perfect operation on all systems... however, it is our goal to make CAM an industry leader both in feature set and user experience. We have a team of very talented engineers, quality assurance, and customer service that work tirelessly towards this goal, but clearly we fell short on the issues reported in this thread. As such, I have 3 action items for myself:

1. An investigation of the outstanding bugs in this thread. If you are still experiencing BSOD, lockups, or extreme memory consumption from CAM, please either respond with your ticket number here or contact me at jeff.gorndt@nzxt.com. I will reach out to you to collect information about your system and keep you updated about our progress on the issue. It is our team's top priority and we will work to resolve it as soon as we are able to reproduce it and diagnose the root cause.
2. Training for our customer service team about what to do with similar issues. Our customer service team clearly didn't have great triage steps for many of the people involved in this thread. I will train them in how to more effectively debug issues so that users' issues are better-understood and are reaching our QA and engineering teams effectively, and so that users will have visibility into when and how their issues will be addressed.
3. A public-facing bug tracker for NZXT CAM. I want our users to have complete transparency about the known issues in CAM, so that they can have confidence that we're addressing their issues and so that our team can have a direct line to users that are encountering issues we're not aware of.

 

I'm sorry to the users that are continuing to experience issues. I know that having a software component which holds back your experience on a hardware component you purchased is a horrible experience. We're working full-time to make sure as few users encounter this situation as possible. I'll be active on this thread every day or two, so please let me know if I can give you any further information.

This is so amazing to see thank you!! I have sent to an email detailing a bunch of things I found about the freezing and am also replying to this message. My ticket no is: 884489. Its really nice to see this message!!

[RxNOOB]

4 hours ago, jakecar91 said:

It is most definitely CAM. I had my computer built and was using all the same components, and then decided to step up my cooler fan, to the Z63 AIO from NZXT. As soon as I downloaded the CAM software and initiated it to adjust settings, all was fine. Then I played a game through blizzard.net, immediately locked up and I had to hard reset. This happened about 30 more times with the EVENT VIEWER only showing ID 41, so the software doesn't report to windows. I would use collaborate during school with this CAM Software running, the same incident occurs. This is a CAM issue, and they most definitely fell short. Nice to see the manager respond to the thread, but I have since, received an E-mail from the NZXT company asking for sensitive data in my file explorer that correlates with the software, funny thing is, it was never a problem with the stock cooler AMD provided. 

Yup. It’s great to see the manager is looking into those matter but unfortunately I sold my GPU and still waiting for my new one to arrive as i initially tho it was due to old parts already

 

PS: Did you guys ever occur that your PC goes to sleep and doesn’t come back up? 

[Dark-vash]

14 hours ago, RxNOOB said:

I have the same issue like you and I didn’t think that It was CAM that was the primary issue. Since then I’ve RMA my MOBO, RAM and PROC and SOLD off my OLD GPU (tho maybe it was too old) currently waiting for my 2080S to arrive and assemble it. The only thing left for me to RMA is my HP EX950 M2.SSD. Since maybe it’s the issue with cam I guess I’ll just use the system without CAM once I got my GPU. 
 

I was a hassle and I never think it was CAM cause i was building a new PC. So much hassle and time wasted 

 

wow! I was also starting to consider that, but in my case, I bought the hardware from across various online stores, and some of them from other countries so I was very concentrated in finding the issue before starting to RMA the hardware. Initially the main issue was the Smart Device on my case, and luckily that brought to places and then here. With CAM closed, I don't have experienced any kind of Crash/Freeze. 

[RxNOOB]

31 minutes ago, Dark-vash said:

 

wow! I was also starting to consider that, but in my case, I bought the hardware from across various online stores, and some of them from other countries so I was very concentrated in finding the issue before starting to RMA the hardware. Initially the main issue was the Smart Device on my case, and luckily that brought me here to places and then here. With CAM closed, I don't have experienced any kind of Crash/Freeze. 

Guess cam at fault here

[Robioto]

13 hours ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all,

I'm Jeff, the product manager for CAM. I've been reading through this thread and there seem to be several issues that have similar symptoms. Some of these issues have been resolved, but some clearly still exist. Because CAM supports millions of software and hardware configurations, all of which call on a different combination of drivers and software components to power the behaviors we offer, it can be difficult for us to guarantee perfect operation on all systems... however, it is our goal to make CAM an industry leader both in feature set and user experience. We have a team of very talented engineers, quality assurance, and customer service that work tirelessly towards this goal, but clearly we fell short on the issues reported in this thread. As such, I have 3 action items for myself:

1. An investigation of the outstanding bugs in this thread. If you are still experiencing BSOD, lockups, or extreme memory consumption from CAM, please either respond with your ticket number here or contact me at jeff.gorndt@nzxt.com. I will reach out to you to collect information about your system and keep you updated about our progress on the issue. It is our team's top priority and we will work to resolve it as soon as we are able to reproduce it and diagnose the root cause.
2. Training for our customer service team about what to do with similar issues. Our customer service team clearly didn't have great triage steps for many of the people involved in this thread. I will train them in how to more effectively debug issues so that users' issues are better-understood and are reaching our QA and engineering teams effectively, and so that users will have visibility into when and how their issues will be addressed.
3. A public-facing bug tracker for NZXT CAM. I want our users to have complete transparency about the known issues in CAM, so that they can have confidence that we're addressing their issues and so that our team can have a direct line to users that are encountering issues we're not aware of.

 

I'm sorry to the users that are continuing to experience issues. I know that having a software component which holds back your experience on a hardware component you purchased is a horrible experience. We're working full-time to make sure as few users encounter this situation as possible. I'll be active on this thread every day or two, so please let me know if I can give you any further information.

Thanks for reaching out Jeff, this is a very frustrating issue and the only issue I have with a new and expensive £2,500 PC. I just raised another ticket (don't have a number) in addition to my original ticket 822824. I'll update that original ticket too right now as I realise that multiple tickets probably doesn't help. I'm happy to help in anyway and hopefully you can get this resolved.

 

[jakecar91]

UPDATE* for the moment, my computer is experiencing no issues after disabling the Cortex software for my keyboard. The cortex software frees up RAM to allocate it towards other software applications such as games or videos, which in turn, it seems to disable the NZXT software. So no freezes thus far on the NZXT software, however, I have no use my keyboard's effects either. 

[mtlmat]

Hi,

Like others, I registered to mention I have the same issue.

Fresh build running Win 10 Pro 20H2

Ryzen 5800X (stock settings)

Corsair Dominator 4x8Gb 3600Mhz

B550 Gigabyte Vision D Motherboard

Kraken X62

MSI 2080 Gaming X Trio

 

I'm experiencing the same soft crash with the system going gradually unresponsive , with mouse cursor still moving, I can start the task manager but it become unresponsive too, access to the start menu but apps won't launch, power off/shutdown does nothing. Generally whatever sound I have keep playing, but video streams stop.

I went through the event log and there was no errors showing up prior to the crash in either system or applications log. The only solution is a hard reboot with the power button.

 

I've been running CAM 4.20 along with Corsair ICue. Will try quitting CAM after the system boots up to see if it helps. Hoping for a fix from NZXT at this point.

 

[nzxt_jeff]

Hi all - Quick update. Our QA team has flagged the possibility that this is caused by running multiple software programs that interact with hardware (CAM, Cortex, Synapse, iCue) while on a system with both AMD CPU and GPU. If you're encountering this issue, can you please try turning off similar programs and using just CAM, and let me know if the issue continues to occur?

 

Thanks,

Jeff

[DrKappy]

1 hour ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all - Quick update. Our QA team has flagged the possibility that this is caused by running multiple software programs that interact with hardware (CAM, Cortex, Synapse, iCue) while on a system with both AMD CPU and GPU. If you're encountering this issue, can you please try turning off similar programs and using just CAM, and let me know if the issue continues to occur?

 

Thanks,

Jeff

Jeff - It looks like you are headed in the right direction.  I changed the startup status to disabled for "CortexLauncher.exe" and "Razer Synapse 3", reboot, start NZXT...and no freeze.  I can generally recreate the freeze by launching steam and playing a game called "Two Point Hospital", when I close the game is when the system freezes.  I tried to recreate it and it did not freeze this time.  In the past, the freeze has occurred about 10 times after closing that game.

 

Since Razer apps are critical for all my Razer peripherals, this obviously is not a solution for me.  Do you have an ETA when this problem may be resolved to allow interaction with these other apps.?

 

Thanks for keeping us updated!

 

James

[nzxt_jeff]

11 minutes ago, DrKappy said:

Since Razer apps are critical for all my Razer peripherals, this obviously is not a solution for me.  Do you have an ETA when this problem may be resolved to allow interaction with these other apps.?

Thanks for letting me know! It definitely won't be our policy that you can't run them concurrently - we will investigate the bug and do our utmost to resolve it. I will update this thread again as I get further information.

[passedpawn]

2 hours ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all - Quick update. Our QA team has flagged the possibility that this is caused by running multiple software programs that interact with hardware (CAM, Cortex, Synapse, iCue) while on a system with both AMD CPU and GPU. If you're encountering this issue, can you please try turning off similar programs and using just CAM, and let me know if the issue continues to occur?

 

Thanks,

Jeff

I do have iCue running also.  I'll leave it off and keep CAM running.  My lockups have been less frequent than others here - only every few days (never happens when CAM is closed).   If I have another lockup, I'll let you know here.  

 

FYI, I don't game, so that's not a factor for me. 

[DrKappy]

35 minutes ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Thanks for letting me know! It definitely won't be our policy that you can't run them concurrently - we will investigate the bug and do our utmost to resolve it. I will update this thread again as I get further information.

Jeff - Some more testing I did.  I rebooted with only CortexLauncher.exe enabled on startup, ran NZXT CAM - and I had a freeze multiple times I tried it.  But, when I tried just "Razer Synapse 3" enabled on bootup and ran NZXT CAM, I had no lockups on multiple tries.  So from a comparability perspective with RAZER, it appears, at least on my system, to be limited to the "CortexLauncher.exe" - which is great news for me.  I can now run all the Synapse profiles for RGB alongside the NZXT CAM Z73 Gif display.

 

Thanks!

 

James

[RxNOOB]

4 hours ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all - Quick update. Our QA team has flagged the possibility that this is caused by running multiple software programs that interact with hardware (CAM, Cortex, Synapse, iCue) while on a system with both AMD CPU and GPU. If you're encountering this issue, can you please try turning off similar programs and using just CAM, and let me know if the issue continues to occur?

 

Thanks,

Jeff

Thanks for the update. I do use Synapse too from Razer and Aura Sync I guess that’s why but it isn’t a permanent solution for it tho. Hope that your team can comes up with a solution soon

[BurntToasters]

6 hours ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all - Quick update. Our QA team has flagged the possibility that this is caused by running multiple software programs that interact with hardware (CAM, Cortex, Synapse, iCue) while on a system with both AMD CPU and GPU. If you're encountering this issue, can you please try turning off similar programs and using just CAM, and let me know if the issue continues to occur?

 

Thanks,

Jeff

Awesome im really glad to see this! I have actually uninstalled synapse before and the freezing issue occurred once again. Though the other hardware apps I run are Logitech G hub and RGB fusion 2.0. I run a Ryzen 7 3800x and a GTX 1070-Ti so I dont have an AMD GPU. 

[Robioto]

Yeah I have iCue for my memory & motherboard RGB and the MSI Dragon Centre for my GPU settings. I'll try with those closed and report back 

[Shadow306k]

13 hours ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all - Quick update. Our QA team has flagged the possibility that this is caused by running multiple software programs that interact with hardware (CAM, Cortex, Synapse, iCue) while on a system with both AMD CPU and GPU. If you're encountering this issue, can you please try turning off similar programs and using just CAM, and let me know if the issue continues to occur?

 

Thanks,

Jeff

Unfortunately, I'm using AMD CPU and NVidia GPU, and even with a fresh install of Windows and ONLY CAM installed, it was still causing the issue. (r5 2600x + GTX1070)

[MelissaGT]

13 hours ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all - Quick update. Our QA team has flagged the possibility that this is caused by running multiple software programs that interact with hardware (CAM, Cortex, Synapse, iCue) while on a system with both AMD CPU and GPU. If you're encountering this issue, can you please try turning off similar programs and using just CAM, and let me know if the issue continues to occur?

 

Thanks,

Jeff

I'm in a similar boat with others in that I can't just stop using other software. I have Corsair fans, so I need to continue using iCUE along with CAM. The main difference for me is that I'm on an AMD chipset and NVIDIA GPU. 

[Dark-vash]

14 hours ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all - Quick update. Our QA team has flagged the possibility that this is caused by running multiple software programs that interact with hardware (CAM, Cortex, Synapse, iCue) while on a system with both AMD CPU and GPU. If you're encountering this issue, can you please try turning off similar programs and using just CAM, and let me know if the issue continues to occur?

 

Thanks,

Jeff

Although my Motherboard has MSI Mystic Light RGB, and the device is installed (through windows 10) I don't have any software installed to manage it nor am I using it. I'm on a AMD CPU and NVidia GPU. New machine, with Windows fresh installation. Might try to disable the Mystic Light on the device manager just to be sure. 

[Nobunaga_if]

Also experiencing the same as the rest of you, disabling CAM stopped the freezing (2 days with no issue)

 

I'll try running it without ICUE and MSI dragon Centre and get back to you in due course

 

   

[djpabz23]

18 hours ago, nzxt_jeff said:

Hi all - Quick update. Our QA team has flagged the possibility that this is caused by running multiple software programs that interact with hardware (CAM, Cortex, Synapse, iCue) while on a system with both AMD CPU and GPU. If you're encountering this issue, can you please try turning off similar programs and using just CAM, and let me know if the issue continues to occur?

 

Thanks,

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

 

even on a new Windows 10 install with ONLY NZXT and Steam installed, I still get the weird crash. Uninstalling NZXT has solved the issue. 

I was on version 4.20 I believe prior to uninstalling.

[DrKappy]

12 minutes ago, djpabz23 said:

Hi Jeff,

 

even on a new Windows 10 install with ONLY NZXT and Steam installed, I still get the weird crash. Uninstalling NZXT has solved the issue. 

I was on version 4.20 I believe prior to uninstalling.

What is your setting in NZXT for "Cooling"?  Mine is set to "Fixed".   That is the only thing I changed on NZXT.  I have NZXT and Synapse running together with no freeze while running games on steam on now.  I was getting freeze consistently on one game that I was playing.  I have tried the game multiple times now and no freeze.

 

I am on:

Product Name:                               NZXT KrakenZ Device (Z73)

CPU Brand Name:                         AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor

Motherboard Model:                      ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING (WI-FI)

BIOS Version:                               1804

Memory:                                         DDR4 3200 MHz G-Skill F4-3200C16-16GTRS (4x16 64GBytes)

Device Name:                                EVGA GTX 770 Dual Classified ACX 4GB (ugh...trying to buy new card!!!!)

Drive Model:                                  Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB

 

 

 

[Robioto]

On 3/3/2021 at 3:48 PM, Robioto said:

Thanks for reaching out Jeff, this is a very frustrating issue and the only issue I have with a new and expensive £2,500 PC. I just raised another ticket (don't have a number) in addition to my original ticket 822824. I'll update that original ticket too right now as I realise that multiple tickets probably doesn't help. I'm happy to help in anyway and hopefully you can get this resolved.

 

I've had my PC running for nearly 48 hours with CAM on and iCue and the Dragon Centre off and have had no crashes. But I need to try this longer as these crashes are so random. I've had to keep my Logitech G Hub on so my keyboard and mouse don't rainbow though. I'll update my ticket with more info, hopefully that will help.