Faulty hardware or something else causing this?

Jasseh

Jasseh

Jasseh

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England
I upgraded to my 4770k with a z87x-oc board a few weeks ago but had to RMA the board as it had a power fault. I received my replacement board on the 6th and installed Windows 8 fresh again.

I spent some time trying to get a stable 4.4/4.5 GHz OC and thought I had it stable at 4.5 until my PC froze, I dropped it back down to 4.4 and again it seemed stable but then my PC froze again.
I decided to just run at stock for a while as I got annoyed at the freezes so I loaded optimised defaults in the bios and carried on as normal.

The problem is, running at stock hasn't removed the freezing issue. It sometimes freezes after the login screen while the desktop is loading, this happens roughly every 1 of 4 reboots. I was considering doing another fresh install of Windows 8 until this morning.
I switched the PC on, it froze again. I pressed the reset button and managed to login fine without it freezing but there was a message about windows updates needing to be installed. I checked those and it was just a couple of updates for Office so I installed those and told the PC to restart...
I left the computer alone for a couple of minutes then came back to see it in the BIOS rather than at the Windows login screen :(.

I am using the PC right now but I don't want to have to put up with the frequent freezes even at stock levels after spending £400 upgrading (from i3-2120).
Anyone have any idea what could be wrong?
 
First check the BIOS in the board and see if its the latest version. If not see what fixes were incorporated into the later ones and if they are relevant to your setup. You might need to update it.

Next check that the "optimised defaults" you set actually match your hardware. Quite often you can choose this only to find its not set your RAM to the default. If you have to set it all manually.

If it still occurs after that I would look at your PSU. Is this the problem ? Test the RAM by having just one stick and rotate it in all the slots to see if this makes a difference.
 
Make sure you check that the SSD is set to run in AHCI mode instead of IDE and that the RAM is setup with the correct timings (X.M.P will do this).

if that still fails, try testing 1 stick of RAM at a time in each slot.
 
varkanoid said:
First check the BIOS in the board and see if its the latest version. If not see what fixes were incorporated into the later ones and if they are relevant to your setup. You might need to update it.

Next check that the "optimised defaults" you set actually match your hardware. Quite often you can choose this only to find its not set your RAM to the default. If you have to set it all manually.

If it still occurs after that I would look at your PSU. Is this the problem ? Test the RAM by having just one stick and rotate it in all the slots to see if this makes a difference.
Click to expand...

The bios is on the latest official release, F6.

I'll check the RAM settings now, hopefully it will just be that.

On the phone with OCUK for the first RMA they asked if I had a Corsair power supply (which I do) but said the 860i had compatibility issues with this board, not the 860.

Thanks for the responses :).
 
Jasseh said:
The bios is on the latest official release, F6.

I'll check the RAM settings now, hopefully it will just be that.

On the phone with OCUK for the first RMA they asked if I had a Corsair power supply (which I do) but said the 860i had compatibility issues with this board, not the 860.

Thanks for the responses :).
Click to expand...

Yeah its a common problem with Gigabyte Z87X-OC and Corsair PSU's but I haven't heard of that many problems with the older non (i) AX series.
 
Ethermaster said:
Yeah its a common problem with Gigabyte Z87X-OC and Corsair PSU's but I haven't heard of that many problems with the older non (i) AX series.
Click to expand...

I really hope it isn't down to compatibility with my PSU, can't afford to replace that (and only bought it in May).

wazza300 said:
GA-Z87X-OC - F7b http://www.mediafire.com/?sgj2igxtq7jok7y

latest beta might be worth trying,have you tested with all the power saving or atleast c7 disabled in the bios to see if that helps? just to rule out psu compatibility
Click to expand...

I had disabled them while trying to get a stable OC and the same freezes happened then. I'll try the beta bios, thanks.

Edit:
Forgot to mention, when trying to take screenshots of the voltage settings in bios it freezes every time, 8 Pack suggested setting SA and IO voltages at +0.15 but that didn't change anything. Screenshots of other sections work fine.
 
Last edited:
2 days later and it seems ok so far, not frozen since updating to beta bios and setting xmp profile on RAM.

Takes longer than my old i3-2120/MSI H77MA-G43 to start up though.
 
it shouldn't take long,10 seconds at the most

be sure to use latest intel rapid storage drivers for your ssd and maybe turning off fastboot in the bios might speedup things

be sure to have the os/ssd on the lowest numbered sata3 port

unplug any usb peripherals just to makesure non of those are stalling the startup
 
wazza300 said:
it shouldn't take long,10 seconds at the most

be sure to use latest intel rapid storage drivers for your ssd and maybe turning off fastboot in the bios might speedup things

be sure to have the os/ssd on the lowest numbered sata3 port

unplug any usb peripherals just to makesure non of those are stalling the startup
Click to expand...

It is the post-login stage rather than up to login screen mainly. Same programs running at start up as before but takes ages before it finishes loading them. I've disabled some at start up but it still seems to take just as long for the remaining ones to load.

Latest intel rapid storage drivers are installed.
SSD with OS is connected to sata port 0.
Only USB peripherals connected are mouse and keyboard.

Oh and the "last time to bios" on task manager always shows 0.0, previous CPU/board always showed the time it took to boot up there.
 
if you have a spare drive to backup your ssd to,or clone it to it,then secure erase the ssd and clone the data back might help

it shouldn't take long no matter howmany programs you have at startup

I got a little 60gb that only has 1gb free and that's just as fast at startup
 
wazza300 said:
it shouldn't take long,10 seconds at the most

be sure to use latest intel rapid storage drivers for your ssd and maybe turning off fastboot in the bios might speedup things

be sure to have the os/ssd on the lowest numbered sata3 port

unplug any usb peripherals just to makesure non of those are stalling the startup
Click to expand...

Why does having fastboot enabled slow things down - seems a bit of an oxymoron????, but you are right though as I have found out.

Mark
 
no idea tbh,but fastboot 99% of the time doesn't work atm,it just might be slowing things down

seen lots of issues with it not working correctly
 
wazza300 said:
no idea tbh,but fastboot 99% of the time doesn't work atm,it just might be slowing things down

seen lots of issues with it not working correctly
Click to expand...

I have been thinking about giving Fast Mode a try for some time but after reading this now I am skeptical.
 
No fast boot enabled. Just timed startup and login a few times:

25 seconds to get from PC off to login screen.
1 minute 55 seconds to get from hitting enter on login screen to last start up program loading

Most programs were running within 30 seconds, 2 took longer. 1 minute 13 for Intel rapid storage technology (multiple attempts same amount of time each attempt) and 1 minute 55 for WhatPulse. I think I can put up with just those 2 taking a bit longer.

SSD performing fine for Samsung Magician's performance tests, not sure secure erasing it is needed.
 
no I don't think secure erase would improve anything

intel storage drivers take a while esp for the green tick to appear but you can still use the pc while your waiting,atleast that's how it is on my two pc's
 
Jasseh said:
Most programs were running within 30 seconds, 2 took longer. 1 minute 13 for Intel rapid storage technology (multiple attempts same amount of time each attempt) and 1 minute 55 for WhatPulse. I think I can put up with just those 2 taking a bit longer.
Click to expand...

Intel RST is only a front end for administering the RST settings. It's deliberately started in the background at bootup so that everything else takes precedence.
 
wazza300 said:
no I don't think secure erase would improve anything

intel storage drivers take a while esp for the green tick to appear but you can still use the pc while your waiting,atleast that's how it is on my two pc's
Click to expand...

Steampunk said:
Intel RST is only a front end for administering the RST settings. It's deliberately started in the background at bootup so that everything else takes precedence.
Click to expand...

Ok, thanks :).

Looking at the app.log file for WhatPulse it seems that is taking almost 2 minutes to start due to having to start a bunch of other things to monitor keys, clicks, uptime and internet traffic. Doubt there is anything I could do to speed that up.

Plus note: no freezes during any of those reboots so it seems like the bios update may have fixed the issue, thanks :). I'll give it another week before I consider trying to overclock it again though lol.
 
WhatPulse. If you're not actually interested in that stuff, I'd uninstall it. Having software hooking into so many low-level systems can always be problematic. If you've got a virus scanner trying to do the same thing, they may be conflicting.
 
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