PC LOCKS UP AT POST

[kiki4431]

Hi

 

I have a wierd problem with my PC, during POST it would (most of the time) go through all of it, and than just when it needs to start loading windows, it would freeze on MSI MAG logo, with text bellow about delete key for BIOS entry, F11 for boot menu, etc. there are no debug lights lit on the motherboard as it happens, and the keyboard is completelly locked up (the num-lock light is lit, but it doesnt turn off when num lock key is pressed, thtat's how i know, that it's locked up, that, and the fact that the PC doesn't respond to any input (delete key or F11 key).

Also, if I try to turn the system off with a power botton, most of the time, it won't, and I have to press and hold it for some time to turn of the system, sometimes instead of shuting down it would restart itself.

 

The only way so far to get out of this situation, is CMOS reset, but as soon as I reaply the settings (that were fine up untill now, been running them for months), after few restarts, it's happening again (I will post the images bellow, describing what settings are changed compared to defaults. most of them are fan curves I applied for case fans, than there is UMA disabled- I don't need my iGPU working, as I have perfectlly good RTX 3070ti in there., OC explore mode - expert - required to activate XMP and change my SOC voltage - it was running over 1,4v by default, so I lowered it down to 1.25 (memtest was stable at the time).

Memory context restore: enabled - if auto, my system would take ages to post (2 min), now it's about 50 sec., I repeat those are the settings that worked flawlessly for months now.

 

System spec:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600x, no OC, running with factory defaults (only SOC voltage decrease)

MB: MSI mAG 650 tomahawk wifi

MEM: Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 6000 Mhz 32 GB (2x16 kit)

SSD (old): Samsung 870 PRO 512 GB

HDD: WD black 7200 RPM 4 TB

PSU: Corsair RMX 750

GPU: EVGA 3070 TI FTW3

Cooling: Corsair H100i RGB PRO XT with additional two ML120 fans for push-pull configuration (two fans are controlled by AIO itself, other two fans by motherboard (headers Fan2 and Fan3), on Fan6 its Arctic 120mm something, not sure about the model, and on FAN1 it's another 140 mm

FAN4, is another 80mm small fan mounted on the bottom of the case (even though there is no actual mounting there, I just screw it into holes that exist in the case, accross the bottom panel)

Case is NZXT h510.

 

Peripherals:

monitor: Asus TUF VG289q1a

mouse: redragon "something" not entirely sure

keyboard: no idea really white shark I think is the mark

There is also LG DVD reader, a SD card reader, UPS and mouse, connected via a usb hub

then there is reciever for wireless mouse and keyboard, I use these when in another room in front of the TV connected via HDMI to my PC, there is also a AV reciever connected via DP.

and a WD external 8TB drive

the system had no issues with any of them.

 

Windows 11 all updates installed

All drivers up to date

Also I am running on the latest BIOS, about month and a half old.

 

There is however a change in the system I made just yesterday before it all started:

So I decided to clean up my system, as I do every 4-6 months, I didn't touch the cooler, that is I didn't un-mount it, I didn't touch the CPU or RAM (it's important to mention this as later the problems does seem to be CPU/memory related, at least according to how the PC is behaving)

And since I already have the PC open and all, I also removed the GPU, so that I can clean it more easilly, and also because I needed to reach under it for SSD, the rest was left in the case, well except the PSU, I removed it so that I can get to HDD cage (too late I realized that the HDD cage is removable, and PSU is completelly irelevant), anyway I did put it back in the way it was and I did double check all connections and stuff.

 

Another thing I did: I moved my Samsung 870 pro from m2 slot 1 to m2 slot 3, and than put my new 990 PRO 1 tb into slot 1, and than another 990 2 tb into slot 2 (both 990s work fine, I tested them in another system), the plan was to clone my 870 pro drive into the new 990 pro 1tb, and than remove my 870 pro altogether, the purpose of secound 990 pro (2 tb), that would be my gaming drive, containing all my games.

I also added another Toshiba 7200 rpm 1tb HDD, hence the need to remove hdd cage, the HDDs are connected to motherboard via SATA A1, and A2 respectivelly (the two connectors on the bottom of motherboard, not the angled ones on the side)

I also replaced my 80mm fan and put a ball bearing 1.05 AMP 4000 RPM much bigger 120mm fan, It's loud but I don't actually run it full speed, just 2500 or so. I needed my GPU as cool as possible, so I decided to just put the strongest fan I could find in there, to blow directlly on the GPU from under it.

And last change was attempt to add a blower style fan that mounts on PCIe slot on the case, and above the GPU, that way, it would draw heat that rises from the backside of the GPU die itself away, as the fan was right above it, but it's enclosure was about 2mm too high, so I kind of push it betwwen GPU and VRM heatsink above, but it didn't work, the fan was pressed against the backplate, and had apsolutelly 0 airflow.

I decided to remove it, also I thought that it's pressing too hard on GPU causing maybe a problem in the PCIe slot, that manifests as lock up., But the lock-ups continued afterwards.

Than I thought, perhaps, my 1,05A fan is drawing too much power, so that makes my PC lock up, I disconnected it, and it's still the same, it was actually fine for a few restarts, but the hangs reappeared, just when I thought it solved.

After that when I managed to get into windows finally, I used my AOMEI partition assistant to clone the 870 pro, and than I removed it, but that didn't solve the problem either.

The one last thing I can remove are The new 990 PROs, but I need both of them, especially now when the 1 tb is also my OS drive and again I tested both of them with samsung magician and AOMEI surface test, and they are fine.

 

One weird thing I experienced, which had never in my 20 yrs of working with PCs happened to me, is that my monitor locks up too, it was just stuck in standby mode, untill I pulled it's plug for a few minutes, didn't show me any image, and its standby light was on, it also didn't respond to any even power button pressing. For a moment I thought my GPU has started acting up.

 

Than after removing my 870 PRO, I started getting "memory management" BSODs just before desktop, like 5 times in a row, I resetted the CMOS again, and it was fine, but also when I reset the CMOS every time, the first time I press the power button my RAM led would be lit, like there is a RAM problem, after I restart from that, it works fine, so I decided to leave it running the memtest, and in test 8 I belive is when errors were discovered, so I put my ram voltage from 1.35 to 1.36, and re-tested again, it was good, no errors., But as soon as I hit restart, the lock up happened again. I repeat once more, I haven't touch the RAM, or it's settings, it was running for months without any issues.

 

 

Now I removed XMP and left it running on default 4800MHZ for now it's good, but I don't know what else will happen.

 

I decided to explain the situation here and ask for help, what is cousing the lockups, and what else can I do?

 

Thanks

Best Regards

 

and yes the settings:

[kiki4431]

Ok, I seem to have solved the issue, or at least I thought so.

 

After some thinking, I realized that newly added SSDs are going directlly to CPU, that is they are under SOC management, and since they are twice as fast, and also bigger, and also now there is two of them, I figured, maybe SOC has now much more load on it, so lower voltage I set was insufficient to run them and the RAM at 6000 Mhz, that would explain why after setting memory to 4800, solved the problem.

 

So, to verify, I restored XMP (6000 Mhz), and it started acting up again, resset CMOS, disable XMP, it was fine, so I raised SOC voltage to 1.26 (it was 1.25 before), and re-enable xmp, and everything was fine, no more issues, no more BSODs, no more crashes, memtest was good, it couldn't be more stable.

 

For three weeks it worked fine, and yesterday I decided to re-connect that 1.05A fan, since I realized that the fan was not an issue, only thing, I extended the wires a bit, so that I can route them behind motherboard tray, back on the other side where the pump header is located. The idea is, pump header can deliver more power than a fan header can, and since fan headers are mostlly 1A that is not enough, so I connected the fan to pump header instead.

 

I turned on my PC, modified pump1 fan curve in bios, so that it doesn't go 100% untill case temperature is like 50c, rebooted the system, and play some games, everything was good, only problem the case temperature was hitting over 50c, so my fan was noisier than my 2000W circular saw.

 

turned off the pc afterwards overnight, and this morning decided to further modify the curve, so that at 60C case temp, the fan wouldn't go over 80%, as I made the change, and since that part in BIOS is tehnically a seperate window, I click on X button to close it, and the whole thing froze, after a while both my mouse and keyboard turned off, and  had to restart, turned off the system with power button (it turned off imidietlly, I didn't have to hold the power button down), restarted, and than, it wouldn't post, it was just stuck on splash logo screen, the keyboard was on but unresponsive.

Turned the system back off (this time I had to hold down the power button), unplug it, and hold the power button for 60 sec, than plug it in and turn it on.

 

After that  I've got that fTPM messge saying that CPU change was detected, (the message disapeared before I could read the whole thing), and the pc posted, but upon login in windows I've got a BSOD imidietlly, before desktop (IRQL not less or equal), the PC restarted itself, and booted up again, this time I seen the desktop for like two secounds before getting yet another BSOD (memory management, this time), the PC restarted and didn't post anymore, just like before, so I repeated the hard reset steps, and now it posted, imidietlly entered BIOS and raised MEM voltage and SOC voltage by 0,01v (1,36 to 1,37 for memory, 1,26 to 1,27 for soc), and now no more blue screens appeared, but every time I restart the PC, it won't post anymore untill I do the hard reset technique (unplug, hold the power button for 30 sec).

 

Everything was fine untill I recconected that fan, seriouslly, can a fan cause such issues??

[kiki4431]

UPDATE: So I've returned from work, disconnected that cursed fan, and try turning on the PC, without the hard reset texhnique, and it POSTed, however, I've recieved another BSOD just before desktop, this time it was PFN LIST CORRUPT, I've never seen this one, it says that it will automatically restart, but it just froze, and nothing happened, so I restarted the PC manually, and again it posted but again just before desktop, another BSOD, this time WDF VIOLATION, another one I've never seen before, this time the PC did restart on it's own, the third time, another BSOD, just before desktop, this one just say 0xc000021a, nothing else, except for other crap it says every time (your PC ran into a problem.....), after the next reset, it no longer loaded anything, after splash screen logo, I would recieve a boot manager error, innacessible boot device 0xc000000e, it offers me the option to select an OS, the only one awailable "Windows" takes me back to 0xc000000e, memory diagnostics gives me some other kind of error, didn't remember which one, but it was something like 0xc0004215a or some other thing, and this repeated every subsequent restart.

 

I decided to boot memtest, but when it loaded and all, started the test, imidiettly very first test (test0) after 1 sec it froze, the keyboard stoped responding, and it just stayed there for 20 minutes, than I decided to restart manually.

When I did, I saw in BIOS my drives (the boot section, they were still visible on system information screen), they dissapeared, I literally lost all boot options except network, CD, HDD, and USB HDD - the basic options you get even when no bootable drives are present, restarted the system, tried loading a boot override menu (F11 key), but it just offered me to enter BIOS setup, nothing else

switched my PSU switch off, and than shorted JBAT1 pins on motherboard, this should clear the CMOS, held that down for 3 minutes, just to be on the safe side, clearlly something wen't wrong with CMOS, but when I turn the PSU switch back on, and than PC, everything was exactlly the same (nothing was cleared, all the settings were still in efect, all the issues still present), that's wierd, but I did manage to clear CMOS through "restore factory defaults" option.

 

now the boot order was restored, I could boot into my SSD (which brings me back to 0xc000000e), and my USB, with both partitions visible, I booted to my windows 11 instalation iso (I am using E2B (partition1) and AGFM with Ventoy (partition2) for multi-boot drive), and tried running startup repair from there, it says fixing drive errors for like 2 secounds, and than the PC restarted, and finally, successfully booted to windows, I decided tu run SFC, it did find corrupted files and fixed them, restasrted the PC, ran another SFC, all good.

 

restored all BIOS settings to what they were yesterday, before connecting the fan, and for the moment the PC works, but I don't know if it will continue to work normally.

I will try running a memtest overnight, and maybe in the morning I do Prime95 for an hour maybe, just to see how CPU behaves.

 

It still puzzles me what the heck was wrong with it, and why the fan seems to be the catalyst of the whole range of problems.