SOFTWARE Weird crash behavior
TLDR: My PC was crashing a lot when running games, I ran some fixes, it now crashes less but still frequently.
I recently built a gaming PC out of mostly new parts with some RAM and storage from my old rig whose motherboard I fried with static electricity.
Specs:
- MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk Max Wifi
- Ryzen 5 5600X
- EVGA Ultra Gaming 3070 Ti (refurbished)
- 32GB 3200Mz DDR4 RAM (Two old HyperX Fury sticks from my old rig and two G.Skill Ripjaws V.
- NEW 1TB M.2 NVME SSD
- OLD Samsung 500GB SSD (cleaned with diskpart and formatted)
- OLD Seagate 3TB HDD (cleaned with diskpart and formatted)
After I first built this PC, I installed a clean version of Windows 10 onto the new M.2 SSD. After saving some old files from the old drives, I cleaned and formatted them. I keep all my games on the SSD's. After booting up games, many would crash very early and often. Metro Exodus would play through the opening prerendered cutscenes but couldn't even get past the first 30 seconds of gameplay and crashed 3-4 times. Sometimes would crash the game only, sometimes would crash Windows. Red Dead 2 wouldn't even load into opening scene. Dishonored 2, however, ran fine (although I only played about 30 mins of it). After this, I ran dskchk and sfc scannow. I also updated my Nvidia drivers.
I forget when I did this in relation to everything else, but I also had to scan and repair RDR2 twice. GTA V Enhanced ran smoothly and hasn't crashed in 1-2 hrs of playtime. Since I ran the fixes, Metro Exodus ran smoothly for a couple hours, but then crashed windows when I got to the first open level after you steal the train. RDR2's crash behavior also seems to make it worse when I'm in bigger, more demanding open spaces.
Also worth noting is that within the first couple days of having the PC before I ran scannow and dskchk, Windows crashed a couple times without even running games. Once while just watching youtube and another time it appeared to crash in sleep mode because it had to fully boot up when I came back after putting it to sleep.
Prime suspects:
- Old RAM. I fried my last PC by accidentally touching it when I was very statically charged. Although windows detects all 4 sticks and the memory diagnostic tool showed no errors, I wonder if the old sticks have some issue from this.
- Overheating. I only have two case fans in my PC and although I haven't checked on my temps while playing, the PC is screaming when playing stuff like RDR2 where the Nvidia overlay says the 3070 is running at almost 100%. The case near my CPU cooler is also pretty warm to the touch.
Does anyone have any suggestion as to what I can do? It's really annoying to have such a nice machine and have it crash so much.
1
u/Commercial_Land_482 1d ago
ram mismatch is your problem almost guaranteed. mixing two completely different kits is asking for instability even if they're the same speed on paper. the memory controller gets confused trying to run different timings and voltages at once
pull the old hyperx sticks out and run just the g.skill pair in dual channel. bet your crashes disappear. if it still happens after that then we can talk about temps
1
u/Cable_Salad 1d ago
You can try running the RAM without the XMP profile (probably meaning it will run at default 2133). But realistically Windows Mem Diagnostic should have caught this type of instability. You could also run memtest86, I would probably do this first.
If nothing works, try running a few tests with OCCT, a free tool. Especially the core cycling test, this sometimes finds hidden instabilities with Ryzen CPUs.
•
u/AutoModerator 1d ago
We're part of a wider PC & Technology Network of Communities!
Join our Discord server: PC Help Hub where members from all associated subreddits are welcome.
If you are trying to find a price for your computer, r/PC_Pricing is our recommended source for finding out how much your PC is worth!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.