Issues with crashing - possibly to do with PCI-E Lanes?

st4rgasm · 10 Jul 2020 at 13:09

Hi all,

I've built a new build recently, specs as follows:

AMD RYZEN 3700x
CORSAIR VENGEANCE RGB PRO 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 3600
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER (EVGA)
ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING.
Storage wise I have:
465GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB (SATA (SSD))
465GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB (SATA (SSD))
223GB KINGSTON SH103S3240G (SATA-3)
465GB Western Digital WDS500G3XHC-00SJG0 (NVME, boot)
465GB Western Digital WDS500G3XHC-00SJG0 (NVME).

The problem:

Build is great - and works fine 99% of the time, however 1 to 2 times a day the computer freezes. It's not a complete freeze, as I can still move the mouse, sometimes open other programs (though I can't click anything once the programs are open), and I can still hear sound from games/discord etc, but for example my friend on discord can't hear me.

I've tried to do a bit of digging but nothing I've found seems to help, the only bit of information I've found that could be relevant is something to do with one of the NVME drives sharing a lane with the GPU which is causing something to malfunction. However, I don't know enough to be able to diagnose whether this is the problem, let alone fix it.

If anyone could shed any light on what on earth is going on, that'd be massively appreciated.

Tetras · 10 Jul 2020 at 13:27

Are any of your drives set to sleep?

st4rgasm · 10 Jul 2020 at 13:34

It was set to 20 minutes, I'll test and see if it changes anything. Cheers! I'm almost hoping the solution isn't that simple!

Tetras · 10 Jul 2020 at 14:02

Would be cool if it is! I assume chipset drivers are installed too, right?

st4rgasm · 10 Jul 2020 at 22:01

Tetras said:
Would be cool if it is! I assume chipset drivers are installed too, right?

Yep, they are. Unfortunately I just had a freeze, doesn't look like this is the issue. I'm at a bit of a loss! Any other ideas?

freddie64 · 11 Jul 2020 at 07:17

What SATA ports are you using?

M.2 slot 1 disables SATA ports 5 and 6 (top ports near RAM).

Thinking maybe they are not totally disabled and switching between SATA and NVME (if this makes sense).

st4rgasm · 11 Jul 2020 at 11:32

freddie64 said:
What SATA ports are you using?

M.2 slot 1 disables SATA ports 5 and 6 (top ports near RAM).

Thinking maybe they are not totally disabled and switching between SATA and NVME (if this makes sense).

I'm not using either of those ports.
I'm using the two bottom ones and one on the middle row, as well as both M.2 slots on the board.

I remember seeing that one of the M.2 slots shares some sort of lane with the GPU slot, is this not likely to affect anything?

freddie64 · 11 Jul 2020 at 12:40

st4rgasm said:
I remember seeing that one of the M.2 slots shares some sort of lane with the GPU slot, is this not likely to affect anything?

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/ROG-STRIX-B450-F-GAMING/specifications/

Going by the spec page for your mobo, using M.2 slot 2 reduces the PCI-E to 8x instead of 16x.

Think in real world usage, equates to only a few % loss of performance on your GTX 2080s.

Not sure if this would have an effect on your NVME though.

Drivers and bios up to date?