To have or not to have (a stable PC)

Hans Power · March 26

I hope this is the right place for this sort of discussion but this is about system stability as a whole, so I thought it might be.

To start with I notice A LOT of forum discussions around the stability of certain titles. Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader for example has tons of people complaining that their game crashes. Granted, the game has been patched but I played it since launch and I have yet a single crash to encounter. Same with Dragon's Dogma 2 - horrible performance given the visual quality? Yes! But crashes? Not on my end. Yet even Steve from Gamers Nexus had multiple crashes across several systems with this game.

And I do not have the fastest system either. You see the system specs below in my sig plus 2x 2GB NVME Gen3 drives with DRAM cache I added recently. And the system is constantly topping out - depending on the game mostly with my GPU but sometimes also with my CPU. No crashes, no bluescreens, though. And seems that my system is almost a unicorn since there are so many people complain about system stability these days. It's overclocked as well, btw - GPU and CPU.

Thing is - I can relate. Prior to this system I had an I5 4690k, a Gigabyte Motherboard and 16Gigs of RAM. And it took years to stabilize the system. Turned out to be memory settings in the BIOS - had to set timings and voltages manually to what was written on the sticks instead of using XMP and that basically did it.

So, with my "new" system I went for stability over everything else. I got 2 sticks 3200 RAM (instead of the 4 sticks in my old system) and made up the mediocre speed by making sure that I bought Dual Rank memory instead of Single Rank memory because Dual Rank typically plays nice and fast with 5000 series Ryzen CPUs

However my current system turned out to not always be 100% stable either - only about 99%. All went well (with that I mean all ~100+ games I currently have installed) until I checked out the Vulcan version of Baldur's Gate 3 which always crashed after a couple of minutes. Just for that I had to reduce my GPU overclock by 50 MHZ (!) from +195 to +145. And with that everything seems 100% stable again.

Then I went for the CPU overclock via PBO. Initially I had the system undervolted with the curve optimizer which went swimmingly however when I added 200Mhz on top the system ran okay for several hours until crashing - mostly while idling oddly enough - rarely if ever during full load. Reducing the undervolt helped with that.

Add to all that that motherboard manufacturers like to pump a little extra juice into the CPUs to make them look better in benchmarks and you got a whole heap of potential problems and who knows if your factory overclocked GPU actually is stable 100% of the time or crashes in those one or two games which ACTUALLY tax the GPU to the max. And we haven't even started talking about PSU's, temperature. and all the other shabang that goes into modern systems.

Anyway I think it's worth discussing. So have you encountered stability issues with your system and found ways to solve it? And if so - what did you do? Maybe we could turn this into a bit of a knowledge base of what can go wrong with your system that causes ever so slight or massive stability issues. And maybe it's worth for Linus Media Group to investigate this as well in a video at some point?

BentleyOwen123 · March 26

i have a very similar build to you and have killed my cpu once haha, i knew nothing about overclocking so i added way to much voltage and it started throttling at like 75' and then black screen, never got that cpu to post again.

OhYou_ · March 26

I dailied a system that would instantly crash if you ran intel burn test or prime95 but ran cinebench r15 fine and played games fine.
for me, I can forgive a crash on launch, or a crash 5 minutes in or something, thats fine. But if the game or system crashes an hour, 2, 3, 4 anywhere deep into a gaming session, thats not good enough.
Generally my pc now only crashes when something is wrong. I've found that memory and power supply are the single most important pieces when it comes to OS crashes, while gpu stability usually is the issue with game and application crashes.

The final thing i've noticed is when you run a flagship gpu, you often have more instability than running a lower tier gpu. It just is what it is.

Hans Power · March 26

12 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

I dailied a system that would instantly crash if you ran intel burn test or prime95 but ran cinebench r15 fine and played games fine.
for me, I can forgive a crash on launch, or a crash 5 minutes in or something, thats fine. But if the game or system crashes an hour, 2, 3, 4 anywhere deep into a gaming session, thats not good enough.
Generally my pc now only crashes when something is wrong. I've found that memory and power supply are the single most important pieces when it comes to OS crashes, while gpu stability usually is the issue with game and application crashes.

The final thing i've noticed is when you run a flagship gpu, you often have more instability than running a lower tier gpu. It just is what it is.

True - GPU overclocking errors usually result in a 141 error shown in the reliability report after a game crash.