New Asus build randomly crashes -help

[niglyn]

Hi, after emptying a coffee into my old pc, I had to quickly order another & had little time to choose before the 4pm deadline for next day delivery.

I chose
MOT-ASU-03432 Asus TUF Gaming Z890-Pro WIFI (LGA 1851) DDR5 ATX Motherboard 1 208.29 208.29 GBP
PRO-INT-03111 Intel Core Ultra 7 265K (Arrow Lake) Socket LGA 1851 Processor - Retail 1 224.16 224.16 GBP
MY-29M-KS Kingston FURY Beast 16GB (2x8GB) DDR5 PC5-44800C40 5600MHz Dual 1 166.66 166.66 GBP
STO-GIG-05731 Gigabyte Aorus 7300 1TB SSD M.2 2280 NVME PCI-E Gen4 Solid State Drive 1 166.66 166.66 GBP
(using on-board graphics)

I put it altogether, adding a new twin radiator & 2 fan heatsink and my exiting case and psu.


A fresh windows boot usb stick was made & Windows 11 installed.

Computer works for a while, but then crashes and recovers.
The crashes become more frequent, the longer the pc is on.
CPU temperature is low, in the 20s, only ever hitting a max of 36 degrees. Motherboard also shows temperature in low 20s.

I have updated the bios to the latest 3002 version.

I have started again, reinstalling windows and formatting the drive on the early install screen, and installing all of the drivers individually.

Still the same crashes.

After repeated crashes, I get a blue screen & it says Winload.efi is damaged and cannot be recovered.

Next thing I tried, was to install windows to a spare Crucial SATA solid state hard drive.
Powered off the machine, booted from UEFI USB and installed on this drive.

Everything now seems stable. As part of the final installation, Asus installs a driver update program, so I let this run & it installed all of the drivers & pc is running fine.

So this all points to the M2 hdd being the issue?
I installed the M2 hdd into a different slot on the motherboard (M2 is pcie4 and the original slot it was installed into was pcie5 capable) and again reinstalled windows.
Again pc was unstable and keeps randomly crashing.

Went back to the Crucial Sata hdd and everything is stable again.

So this seems to confrim the M2 hdd is faulty?

What are Overclockers like on returns? Will they accept my description above & take the return? I will exchange for a different brand.

Is there anything I have overlooked?

Tia.

 

[Tetras]

Went back to the Crucial Sata hdd and everything is stable again.

So this seems to confrim the M2 hdd is faulty?

Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.

What are Overclockers like on returns? Will they accept my description above & take the return? I will exchange for a different brand.

I should think so. Can you check the SMART data with the M.2 installed? A screenshot of an obviously bad SSD from something like CrystalDiskInfo may be helpful.

 

[niglyn]

Hi, I have taken the ssd out now & don't really want to put it back.

I notice the price of this ssd has jumped £40 since I ordered it on Wednesday.

I can order a pcie-5 Crucial for £170 on amazon (same one is £200 on overclockers) & will arrive tomorrow, but don't want to do this if overclockers won't take the return for refund & insist I have to get another from them.

They might be fine, I don't know. Have ordered my last three new-build pc components from them, but never needed to return anything, so no idea what they are like.

I'm sure they must get many issues with pc-builds not working. Lucky I had a spare ssd to use & it has solved the issue.

If it had not, what does one do? Could have been cpu, motherboard or software/drivers.