Strange system behaviour

[SilencerPL]

Hello. Recently I'm expieriencing strange behaviour on my system and I don't know what can be the cause of this, as the symptoms that occur never happened in my life.

 

In March 2023 I've upgraded my hardware to the following:

 

CPU: i9-13000KF

MOBO: ASROCK Z790 Riptide PG  (up to date BIOS v8.01).

GPU: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING OC LHR 10GB GDDR6X

RAM: Ripjaws S5, DDR5, (2x16) GB, 6000MHz, CL36 (F5-6000J3636F16GX2-RS5K)

PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 850W 80 Plus Gold ATX 3.0

Sound Blaster AE5 Plus

Various SSDs (2x MVE Samsung 980 EVO 500GB (system) and 2TB) 3x other SATA SSDs 

 

At the beginning after installing hardware I've booted my system that was run under Ryzen 3900. The first issue I had at that time was that after using more than 50% of my RAM applications started to crash. Well fair enough after changing so much in Hardware, so I made clean Windows 10 install. It worked fine until somewhere in June something strange happened. I'm a software developer and I'm using Visual Studio. Since June Visual Studio started to crash quite frequently: during GIT operations, during typing, during opening SpecFlow features, during DEBUG, additionally all browsers (Edge, Chrome, Brave, Firefox) started also to crash without reason. It was either complete close or the tabs reported some access violation or some such errors - but refresh would "fix" the issue. I've lived with the problem for a month and I decided to do something with it. So I looked at the Event Viewer and the applications crashed with either error: 0xc0000005 or 0x00000409. Google mostly said it's either RAM issue or corrupted files. So I've run those special Windows commands, but it found nothing. I've used CC Cleaner which only found some registery entries to missing Framework files. However after that CC Cleaner fix Windows Defender start to crash and many times it couldn't get itself on, unless I do a restart. So I've fired up Memtest86 and run it for a night: No Errors. Next I fired LYNX with full memory usage (27GB it allowed me). It run for ~2h: No Errors.

 

So I proceeded with clean Windows 10 install... and the problem did not vanish. Fresh Windows 10 and same situation. Windows Defender crashing, browsers crashing, Visual Studio crashing. In addition I couldn't install any NVIDIA pacakge that could be directly downloaded from their site. Either the setup crashed or just aborted the operation. Strangely I could install GeForce Experience and update the drivers from there. So I moved to Windows 11. Fresh install and after first boot from freshly copying files I got a BSOD (couldn't get the error because it restarted fast), but on the next load everything was fine. With fresh Windows 11, situation did not change much, except Windows Defender did not crash, however Visual Studio and browsers still behaved in similar matter.

 

My next approach was to remove 1 stick of RAM. With 1 stick (16GB) situation is stable but not super stable. Visual Studio sometimes crashes during GIT operations, and sometimes does wierd stuff during compilation (external apps create errors like for example NodeJS.exe). Chrome for entirity of the day doesn't crash, however when I leave PC active during night, at one point Chrome will "Crash". In addition if I'm using Visual Studio and Vegas Pro 20.0 at the same time and few other apps and my RAM is between 1-2GB Free then Visual Studio starts to act up again with frequent crashes.  For another test I bought cheap 16GB RAM stick from GoodRam and the situation is similar as if I was using 1 stick of RIPJAWS.

 

Can someone explain to me what is wrong with my system and which part is broken? Because I have no clue what is wrong. There are no BSODs in regular usage, only crashes and of specific applications. When it comes to gaming, I'm not sure whether games are impacted by the above situation, because as we know recently game devs don't write good code, but I'll list games I've recently played.

 

World of Tanks: Since patch 1.21 I had issues with Fulscreen mode, crashing the game tremendously. Moving to borderless at first solved the issue, but the crashes sometimes occur.

Aliens: Dark Descent. Infrequent crashes, all reported by Unreal Engine. Possibly due to bad code?

Dave The Diver. Infrequent crashes mainly when switching areas.

Jagged Alliance 3: Crashing mainly at night with rain. Event Viewer also reports that additional dll that crashes is ntdll.dll

 

Visual Studio when crashes sometimes additionally reports Kernel32.dll or git2-msvstfs.DLL or others like VBCSCompiler.exe, Microsoft.Alm.Shared.Remoting.RemoteContainer.dll all errors are 0xc0000005

 

[Sawa Takahashi]

Try running your RAM without XMP to see if the situation improves. XMP is in fact an overclock and is not guaranteed to work stable on all systems.

[SilencerPL]

XMP is not active.

[Whatisthis]

Do you have a second drive you can try? It could be a failing SSD. They can cause weird erratic behavior.

[SilencerPL]

Unfortunately I don't have spare drive, I would have to buy a new one. Here is what ClearDiskInfo shows. I bought this drive in 2019. My D drive is 66% but that's very old drive where nothing is installed.

 

[SilencerPL]

So I've managed to install Windows on separate drive but the issue remains the same.

 

Test scenario: I open Vegas Pro 20 and run a project. Open Visual Studi 2019. Visual studio either crashes on load or during for example recomplie. Strangely I've now recieved first BSOD on the "new' Windows IRQL_LESS_OR_EQUAL during this procedure. With 32GB I have ~16GB "free" memory and by "free" it's buffered by Windows.  So I guess I can rule out faulty drive. But still not sure whether it's something with RAM or Motherboard.

[xdos]

Reseat the cpu check for pins and reinstall windows again. Mostly windows problem if your ram is not faulty. your drive is looking fine..

[SilencerPL]

So I went extra trouble and bought Gigabyte Aourus Elite AX, and the problem occured at follows.

 

Strangely upon switching things happened like this:

 

On default setting the PC booted and windows loaded normally.

Upon enabling XMP PC booted Windows loaded normally but BSOD after few minutes in login screen

Reverted to default and updated Bios

 

Windows stopped to boot (black screen) but keyboard was responsive.

All Windows self repair options failed: SFC, Restore to previous point.

 

Now here where things got even worse.

So I tried to fresh install Windows 11. 

 

So it was 0xc0000005 error in multiple places. Like preparing windows files, running installer, different BSODs after finishing windows installer. I once got to running windows but it kept itself in repeat when creating account and preparing for first run.

 

I did it even on the simpliest configuration.  Only 1 drive, even bought a new NVMe drive, just GPU and either 32GB of G.Skill RAM or 1 stick of either G.Skill or GoodRam. 

 

So does that mean, that my CPU got bonkered? Or am I that unlucky and the Gigabyte MOBO is also broken?