My Kingston Renegade 2TB M.2 SSD stops working when gaming. Works fine for a while after reboot until I start playing games from it.

[BrooklyNY]

Hello to everyone,

 

I will be very thankful if someone can help me with the issue I have. It's driving my crazy!

 

Basically I have the absolute same 1:1 behavior as the person in this topic: 

He solved the issue by removing mod cables attached to his power supply. I can see another person there solving the issue the same way, but I do not have any mod cables attached to my power supply. Also, it was working fine for several months and suddenly it started after I moved houses.

 

I tried: re-installing Windows 11, clean the PC and basically rebuild the PC in the process, chkdsk - passed OK, updating BIOS, updating SSD firmware, checking if TRIM operations are enabled, checked the SSD with the built in software in BIOS - passed OK. I am starting to run out of ideas. Any help will be highly appreciated.

PC Specs:
MB: MSI X570 GAMING PLUS

CPU: Ryzen R5 3600

RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance  3200MHz DDR4

GPU: RTX 3080 10GB

SSD: Kingston Renegade 2TB PCIe 4.0 - installed in the correct 4.0 slot on the MB, another Kingston 1TB NV1 - installed at the PCIe 3.0 slot on the MB

HDD: 2x 2TB SATA Seagate drives

PSU: Corsair HX1000i
No overclock of any kind except for XMP enabled in BIOS.

Thank you in advance!
 

[WackySpace]

The only different thing I found is this.

 

Heat Issues: SSDs can throttle their performance to prevent overheating. If your SSD is getting too hot during gaming, it might slow down or stop working to cool down. Kingston recommends placing a 3rd party heatsink atop the Graphene Aluminum Heat Spreader for best thermal performance

 

Use HWinfo to check SSD temperature when games are running or some other tool. Not sure if this is causing games to stop working but you can check.

 

Safe temps for normal tasks is 40-45 and gaming 65-68'C.

Edited October 28, 2023 by WackySpace

[BrooklyNY]

31 minutes ago, WackySpace said:

The only different thing I found is this.

 

Heat Issues: SSDs can throttle their performance to prevent overheating. If your SSD is getting too hot during gaming, it might slow down or stop working to cool down. Kingston recommends placing a 3rd party heatsink atop the Graphene Aluminum Heat Spreader for best thermal performance

 

Use HWinfo to check SSD temperature when games are running or some other tool. Not sure if this is causing games to stop working but you can check.

 

Safe temps for normal tasks is 40-45 and gaming 65-68'C.

Thank you for your reply. 

 

The temperatures are well below what you mentioned. This Fury Renegade comes with a heatsink preinstalled. It idles around 30'C and it stays around 50'C mark during gaming. The NV1 has no heatsink and it operates within the temperatures mention by you. The OS is on the NV1 and now I moved Alan Wake 2 there, so that I can play it.  If I play it from the Fury it crashes. It is not just Alan Wake 2 it's all of the games I tried that are installed on the drive that do that. I don't believe that it's an overheating issue.

[WackySpace]

Just now, BrooklyNY said:

Thank you for your reply. 

 

The temperatures are well below what you mentioned. This Fury Renegade comes with a heatsink preinstalled. It idles around 30'C and it stays around 50'C mark during gaming. The NV1 has no heatsink and it operates within the temperatures mention by you. The OS is on the NV1 and now I moved Alan Wake 2 there, so that I can play it.  If I play it from the Fury it crashes. It is not just Alan Wake 2 it's all of the games I tried that are installed on the drive that do that. I don't believe that it's an overheating issue.

I'm not sure what else can be causing it, as you said you did a firmware update and installed the drivers? Maybe formatting it again would fix the problem but that is unlikely.

[OU812]

My intel 665p did something similar a while back. Turns out a driver that was pushed to me by windows update was causing it to just disappear. I found a older  driver and ran that till a new one came out.

[BrooklyNY]

I am out of ideas. I've added PCIe wireless card recently. Can it be some sort of overloading of the PCIe controller or some power related issue? What can I try to check if this is the case?

[Uptivuptiz]

You can try swapping around the 2 NVMe SSDs so that the Renegade is in the bottom slot. If this doesn't solve the issue try disconnecting as many of the drives that you don't need to boot to Windows and test again. Then if the issue goes away, add the drives one by one, testing to see if the issue comes back each time. Could be that one of the other drives is a bit funky.

[BrooklyNY]

On 11/10/2023 at 4:50 PM, Uptivuptiz said:

You can try swapping around the 2 NVMe SSDs so that the Renegade is in the bottom slot. If this doesn't solve the issue try disconnecting as many of the drives that you don't need to boot to Windows and test again. Then if the issue goes away, add the drives one by one, testing to see if the issue comes back each time. Could be that one of the other drives is a bit funky.

I did this and it's working for now.

It kind of bugs me that I have a PCI-E 4.0 drive in the PCI-E 3.0 slot. What is the point to have a drive this fast if I can't use it's full potential. I guess it is better to have the storage rather than nothing. 

[BrooklyNY]

Sorry for the double post but I actually found the issue and the solution to this, so I just wanted to post this for people who might have the same issue. 

It turns out that the problem comes from my PCI-E WiFi card. I removed it, just to test if the SSD will work properly in the PCI-4 slot and suddenly, no problems. Played for hours without any crashes. The PCI-E card was installed in the bottom PCI-E slot on the MB. I moved it to the full size PCI-E slot located just under the GPU and again - no problems. It seems like when in the bottom slot the power of the PCI-Es changes somehow trying to get through all the lanes leading to this bottom slot.

Interestingly the FPS in the performance test of Batman Arkham Knight went from average 90FPS to average 160FPS. I was testing if it will crash to this test and was surprised to see the jump in FPS after removing the WiFi card altogether. When in the full size PCI-E slot now, FPS remains high and much more stable than before. It is defiantly some sort of power issue. Some people solve it by removing cable mods, others when removing RGB strips, in my case it was the WiFi card. So, if you have similar issue try removing those and it will most probably fix it for you.

I am a happy man now. The drive is in it's Gen4 slot and it's blazing fast, my FPS problem that I didn't even know I had was fixed and my WiFi and Bluetooth are working alongside everything.

 

Thanks to everyone who helped me!

Happy Holidays!