Random hard freezes

[Tyo_]

Hey everbody,

 

I'm having trouble with my fairly new PC which is built approx. Dec 2015. The PC randomly freezes in periods between 20secs and a few hours (in most cases it is just a few minutes though).

Once frozen mouse inputs are not recognized anymore and I need to shut down the PC by long pressing the power button.

I'm kind of desperate with this situation.

 

Here are the steps I've taken so far:

• Load optimized defaults in UEFI/BIOS
• Ran with only one of the two RAM sticks (tried both) in different slots on the mainboard
• Disconnect the graphics card and used the onboard graphics
• Ran both Windows and Ubuntu (Ubuntu freezes even if I boot into a live system)
• BIOS update
• Different power supply
• Monitored thermals
• Searched for similar problems on the LTT forums

To this point I'm thinking about rma'ing the motherboard. But before I do that I appreciate every help and hints about what I might try before.

 

The system specs are as follows:

• Core i5-6500
• Asus Z170-A motherboard (BIOS version 1702)
• 8GB Kingston HyperX Savage DDR4-2400
• Asus GeForce GTX970 STRIX
• Enermax Revolution XT 630W PSU
• Samsung SM951-NVMe M.2 PCIe-SSD 256GB
• 1TB WD Blue
• EKL Alpenföhn Matterhorn (yes I'm from Germany) CPU cooler
• Both Windows 10 and Linux Mint 17.3 are 64bit

Again, any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance and sorry for my potentially bad english

[AngeloG.]

So, you swapped GPU, PSU and RAM. OS seems to not matter. 

 

Are you running your RAM at a correct frequency / timings?

[Tyo_]

Yes. When I first got the parts then RAM ran at 2400 (preconfigured XMP by Asus BIOS) but once I restored the optimized defaults the RAM was set back to 2133MHz. And this is what I'm running it on right now.

[Tyo_]

A small update of what I tried so far (in addition to what I described above):

 

• Asus has released a new UEFI update (1801), which sadly did not fix the problem
• After a lot of googling I found that some people fixed the issue when they disabled CPU C states and/or fast boot. Did that too, no changes.
• Monitored the cpu temperature
• Loosened the cpu cooler (also found something about that on google).

Hoping for more ideas!

[The Falcon]

Have you open the windows event viewer and go over the events taking place at the time the computer freezes to try get more detail on whats causing the system hang?

[Tyo_]

No but that's a great idea! I'll report back once I've tried that. Maybe this helps or at least gives a clue on what might cause the problem.

[The Falcon]

3 minutes ago, Tyo_ said:

No but that's a great idea! I'll report back once I've tried that. Maybe this helps or at least gives a clue on what might cause the problem.

I am honestly surprised it had not been suggested yet, that for me at-least is always step one when diagnosing unexplained issues..

[Tyo_]

After having to restart the pc 3 times or so, I finally managed to get into the event viewer.

Sadly I couldn't find any useful information. Most of the events were of the "information" event type and contained something like "A user successfully logged in"..

Other warnings were a few days to weeks old.

 

I then waited for another freeze (for which I did not have to wait long) and wrote down the time. Restarted the pc again. The time immediately before the freeze did not contain any useful events. There were no events for like a minute or so before the freeze.

[The Falcon]

1 hour ago, Tyo_ said:

After having to restart the pc 3 times or so, I finally managed to get into the event viewer.

Sadly I couldn't find any useful information. Most of the events were of the "information" event type and contained something like "A user successfully logged in"..

Other warnings were a few days to weeks old.

 

I then waited for another freeze (for which I did not have to wait long) and wrote down the time. Restarted the pc again. The time immediately before the freeze did not contain any useful events. There were no events for like a minute or so before the freeze.

Wow, windows logs everything. Have you tried running the system on a different hard drive? or running S.M.A.R.T to see whats happening with the drives you have? 

[Tyo_]

8 hours ago, The Falcon said:

Wow, windows logs everything. Have you tried running the system on a different hard drive? or running S.M.A.R.T to see whats happening with the drives you have? 

As described in my initial post I have tried running a Linux live system from an usb stick and it still freezes. The live system did not have any hard drives mounted. I could however try running a live system with all of the hard drives physically disconnected from the system...

The last time I checked the S.M.A.R.T. status (which was yesterday or something) everything looked fine..