freezing during high cpu load

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16 Nov 2005
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Hi all hoping I might get some help with my recently upgraded pc

had a post in GPU section when I thought it might be the cause but now I’m suspecting it’s cpu temp related so before I start throwing money at a new case cooling etc would be good to get a second opinion

specs (everything is circa 5years old unless stated):
5820k @ 4.5ghz
Powercolor 6800XT red dragon (new)
Msi x99 krait edition
16gb hyper X predator 2400mhz
Corsair 850RMX (new)
evo 850 120gb & 500gb SSD's
PCI WiFi card
phanteks evolv ATX case

Cooling:
Ek D5 140 xres
240mm magicool g2 slim rad installed in top of case with 2x Corsair sp120’s set as intake
3x sp120’s in front of case set as intake
1x AF140 in the rear as exhaust

After treating myself to a new ultra wide Screen I decided to finally upgrade my old R9 290 which was water cooled

previously I had the 240 rad set as exhaust and a 360mm coolgate g2 rad in the front set as Intake

the setup ran fine for 5years or so with temps never really getting into the 70’s from memory on the cpu under testing

I bought the 6800xt on the spur of the moment when OC announced a 3D printed stock drop and the 850RMX to replace the previous 650 RM

I hadn’t appreciated no one made a water block for the red dragon which meant it wouldn’t fit in the case with my previous setup

I stripped everything down including the d5 and cpu water block then reassembled with new tubing into its current configuration with fresh windows install, bios update and updated drivers

installed RDR2 ran some benchmarks and got down to some proper gaming for the first time in years after life got in the way

after playing for half hour or so the game froze solid and required a hard reset which was then repeated on separate occasions

event viewer reports nothing other than uncontrolled shutdown error and whocrashed records nothing

I started monitoring temps, the GPU was hitting junction temps of 100-110degrees CPU was in the 70’s so at first thought it might be the game as it was know to have issues but getting plagued with freezes I then started suspecting the GPU temps

I then did some further testing after playing around with the GPU fan profile and temps generally were fine with no more than high 90’s junction and core temp 10-15 degrees below.

On the 7th consecutive bench with me watching the GPU temps it froze up with the CPU temps in the mid 70’s but GPU still in high 90’s so shouldn’t even been throttling at that temp

I pulled of the case sides and fronts and stuck a desk fan pointing into the pc and had no further issues

so started testing the CPU via intel extreme tuning and running cpu stress tests to heat soak the loop then benchmarking which replicated the freezes

Obviously with no GPU load and it failing while stressing the CPU I assume that means I can discount the GPU and PSU

As of today I’ve sealed up all the openings in the radiator tray to help with air flow through the rad and have upped the fan curves did some more testing and it seemed to improve stability with out crashing but probably needs further testing to be certain it’s cured the issue

When I rebuilt the machine I knew that cooling was going to suffer from losing the 360rad but didn’t think it was going to be this bad

similarly whilst I love evolv case for its aesthetics the airflow through the top always looked suspect I didn’t appreciate how ineffective it was

the part that I’m really not sure of is that 75-80 degrees, according HWinfo / XTU shouldn’t be causing the CPU to fall over? So is there something else at play here that I’m missing?

Current plan is to find a new case that can take a 360 rad, a d5 and the air cooled GPU or I’m on the verge of junking the water cooling and buying a 360 AIO which would be disappointing

sorry for war and peace but be good to get some feed back
 
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Drop the overclock on the cpu see if things change but more alarming is the gpu temps.

Can you mount some fans on the psu shroud ?

i ran some testing without the OC and it stayed stable but then the cpu temps were also a lot lower

Originally was pretty concerned with the GPU temps but after posting a thread in the GPU section, consensus was it was within spec for the card

ultimately I think I’m going to recase in to a lian li o11XL as it looks like it got the space to accommodate the GPU and a D5 to the side and the air flow will be miles better ( did ask whether it fits in the cases subsection but got no reply, and every build I see use a distro plate) so if anyone reading this has something similar would be interested to know
 
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Not something I’d really considered maybe naively, as I’d assumed an unstable overclock would have generated a BSOD and also I seem to be able to bench/stress test/ game with out issue if I make sure the case is fully open

I’ll try tweaking it but it’s been 5years since I set it up so might have to go dig out some guides lol
 
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I had a graphics card once that did this. It locked up the system at exactly 74 degrees, lol. I think the thing here is that CPU is getting older and it's starting to slip a little and when it gets warm it's just collapsing. As mickyflinn says, it may be a good idea to down-clock so it can get hot without falling over.
 
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Guess that’s why we love tinkering with them...

On a more positive note after the last hour of messing about and testing think I might of solved the issue by one of the following:

reseated the ram - couple of people mentioned it in the other thread so thought I’d give it a try

reseated the GPU and tried to adjust out the sag

tightened down the cpu block that seemed a little looser than I left it!

this is on top of me blocking of the radiator tray opening and raising the fan curves

So no idea what was to blame but my suspicion still remains that it was temp related and the combination of the rad recirculating in the case and the block not making as good contact as it could

This has shaved 10degrees of the temps when running 10mins of XTU cup stress testing followed by consecutive runs of XTU benchmarking which typically locked the machine up

hopefully it’s cured as I’d quite like to get on an enjoy the thing instead of throwing money at a variety of coolers, fans and a case and the nuclear option which was new cpu, mobo and ram :rolleyes:
 
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