AMD Zen Discussion Thread

smacl

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

I was just curious what level went into it on community forums. I thought I could read them well(a long time ago) but the only option was to teach yourself.

I'm coming at it mostly from the software side where Stackoverflow and Serverfault can be pretty good if a bit snarky and MSDN tending to throw up a lot of similar answers from MVPs who tow the Microsoft line a bit too much. I process crash dump files regularly, but they tend to be application level and I have the symbols (e.g. PDB files) and code knowledge to make sense of what is going on. Without symbols best you can do in my experience is find out faulting module and send the dump file on to them. A dump file relating to a driver or BIOS issue is going to be no use to Microsoft for example. The strategy I use these days is simply to send the dump file to all the suspected sources and see if one of them sticks.

Totally agree with the self learning thing but the community forums are a huge asset to achieving this.

.G.

Are they're any non MSI B450 or x470 boards out there that are Ryzen 5 ready out of the box? Or any that have a bios flashback facility.

Might buy another board just to see if it helps.

I think a few of the higher end Asus boards might have flashback.

.G.

Probably be pricey too I suppose! Was hoping for a budget option since it may not be the issue anyway! All the Budget options with flashback are MSI.

savemejebus

.G. wrote: »

Probably be pricey too I suppose! Was hoping for a budget option since it may not be the issue anyway! All the Budget options with flashback are MSI.

Was your mobo a MAX version? If not then a maybe an x470 or b450 MAX would be a budget option. I get it's still MSI but at least you wouldn't need to worry about a bad bios flash.

.G.

No not a Max. I checked the last bios revisions on the other msi boards and they were all November like our one. Obviously there's loads of people using them without issue but it just worries me that I buy one and it solves nothing!

.G.

Just remembered CCL do a free bios update so that solves that. Have MSI and Ubisoft on the case so will see what they come up with first.

.G.

MSI have thrown their hat at it and asked me to follow up with my retailer for recourse. Thankfully it was bought from Amazon who as we know are absolutely sound, they've offered a return for full refund so I'm taking the chance and I've bought the newer MAX version off them and hope for the best. At least I'll know soon enough if it was the motherboard after all! Should have the new one soon and will send the old one back when I get it.

cherryghost

Good old MSI. The worst customer support experience I've dealt with in the PC industry, by far.

wotzgoingon

Old news but just remembered it again. 3990X runs Crysis without graphics card.

Serephucus

Give it 5 years at the current pace, and it'll be running 1080/60 maxed out. :pac:

Cuddlesworth

AMD putting the screws to intel, price drops to the 3k series on top of the super low prices on the last 2 generations.

.G.

Interesting. Would have expected them to hold off on price drops until the 4th gen drops.

.G.

New motherboard installed about 3 hours now and one game crash and a BSOD already :rolleyes::rolleyes::mad:

wotzgoingon

.G. wrote: »

New motherboard installed about 3 hours now and one game crash and a BSOD already :rolleyes::rolleyes::mad:

Not good. I don't know what is wrong. Must be memory. Are you overclocking?

.G.

Nope. Everything at stock in the BIOS. Interestingly, I put his Ram in my machine for a while and he had mine, and then swapped back again but since then I've had three BSOD's myself having not had any for months! My ram possible screwed by his machine?!

Every BSOD he gets is a different error code too.

wotzgoingon

I feel for you and it's a odd one. I honestly have had no issues with my system except for one time the bios reset itself but I think I know what caused that as I have a older second GPU in my system that I run a old version of Linux on and forgot to switch back to the 5700 XT to run my Windows 10.

.G.

Ubisoft had no answers up to now still investigating. Mainly seems to happen when he's playing their games. Neither did msi so just at the stage now where we just have to put up with it. Had another BSOD after my earlier post. Considered buying another 3600 but just going to leave it now and hope it doesn't get worse.

savemejebus

.G. wrote: »

Nope. Everything at stock in the BIOS. Interestingly, I put his Ram in my machine for a while and he had mine, and then swapped back again but since then I've had three BSOD's myself having not had any for months! My ram possible screwed by his machine?!

Every BSOD he gets is a different error code too.

More likely would be his bad ram corrupting your windows install. I think that i read about that happening before but that was from running unstable overclocked ram.

.G. wrote: »

Ubisoft had no answers up to now still investigating. Mainly seems to happen when he's playing their games. Neither did msi so just at the stage now where we just have to put up with it. Had another BSOD after my earlier post. Considered buying another 3600 but just going to leave it now and hope it doesn't get worse.

Have you tried a a clean build with no ubisoft games installed to see what happens?

z0oT

.G. wrote: »

Ubisoft had no answers up to now still investigating. Mainly seems to happen when he's playing their games. Neither did msi so just at the stage now where we just have to put up with it. Had another BSOD after my earlier post. Considered buying another 3600 but just going to leave it now and hope it doesn't get worse.

I don't think anyone else has suggested this to you in this thread - MemTest should be your 1st port of call if you think you've a memory issue.
https://www.memtest86.com/

It runs from a bootable flash drive which has the advantage of taking the OS out of the equation & isolating the memory. Set it up and run it overnight, if you don't get any errors you should be good.

At least that would allow you to rule out the memory once and for all.

.G.

savemejebus wrote: »

More likely would be his bad ram corrupting your windows install. I think that i read about that happening before but that was from running unstable overclocked ram.



Have you tried a a clean build with no ubisoft games installed to see what happens?

I didn't have any BSOD on my own machine with his ram in it, only getting them since I took my my ram back out of his machine and put back into mine! Not too concerned about that anyway, his is a much bigger issue. Havent tried to clean build without ubisoft but it's their games is all he plays. Might try it. When we built it yesterday I only installed windows, essential drivers, bitdefender and uplay for Seige and the division two Nothing else. Still crashed.

.G.

z0oT wrote: »

I don't think anyone else has suggested this to you in this thread - MemTest should be your 1st port of call if you think you've a memory issue.
https://www.memtest86.com/

It runs from a bootable flash drive which has the advantage of taking the OS out of the equation & isolating the memory. Set it up and run it overnight, if you don't get any errors you should be good.

At least that would allow you to rule out the memory once and for all.

Yeah was suggested and I've tried it. His ram passed with no issues reported over 13 hours of testing overnight. I haven't stressed the cpu yet, might do that with the new board in place now.

savemejebus

.G. wrote: »

I didn't have any BSOD on my own machine with his ram in it, inky getting them since I took my inw ram back out of his machine and put back into mine! Not too concerned about that anyway, his is a much bigger issue. Havent tried to clean build without ubisoft but it's their games is all he plays. Might try it.

You wouldn't necessarily have them immediately, data corruption can be weird. Edited as answered

.G.

savemejebus wrote: »

You wouldn't necessarily have them immediately, data corruption can be weird. running an overnight of memtest from http://www.memtest.org/ (the free unlimited version) as Zoot suggested (I know you ran the limited paid version before) is still a good plan too.

Yeah see above. I got access to the paid version and ran it over night with no issues found. Havent tried my own ram though, must check that.

Cuddlesworth

.G. wrote: »

Yeah see above. I got access to the paid version and ran it over night with no issues found. Havent tried my own ram though, must check that.

Boot a live linux OS and use the stresstestapp google created memory test.

H3llR4iser

.G. wrote: »

New motherboard installed about 3 hours now and one game crash and a BSOD already :rolleyes::rolleyes::mad:

Jeez .G. , this is the weirdest issue I've seen in a while.

If I tracked the issue and your troubleshooting till now correctly, you tried:

- Swapping out the ram sticks
- A different motherboard
- Swapping GPUs
- Stress testing the RAM

I've never seen a modern CPU cause so specific an issue, usually if a CPU is faulty it shows pretty obiviously, but it can't be excluded.

At this point, a CPU stress test is the next step - I'd go OCCT, Prime95 or Aida...or even set Cinebench to run for a long time (hours).

Lastly, two more "suspects" - have you tried a different storage device for the OS and game(s)? The fact the BSODs happen in game might be related to data I/O to the disk (e.g. loading/caching textures and models, pagefile).

I had a faulty SSD on a laptop in the past doing something similar - it'd work no problem for weeks, running everything fine, then suddenly BAM! - blue screen of death, usually when doing something like moving a large file or saving a big PSD. On reboot, all worked normally. Formatted the SSD, reinstalled everything from scratch, rinse repeat - a week or two ok, then BSODs.

Finally, how about the PSU?

.G.

Firstly thanks for all the replies. I'm not the only one who would like to find the source of this clearly .

So as mentioned above,

I've tried:-

different ram and have stressed the original ram over night with no issues found
Now have a different mobo installed
Have also taken out both his storage devices and tried two completely different ones to no avail.

I haven't swapped out the gpu or the psu. The Psu is a 550w gold unit from seasonic. Going by online calculators that should be fine for a 3600 and a 1080. It's about a year and a half old I reckon.

I also haven't tried a different gpu as the only other one I have is my 2080ti and I don't think the psu will cope, maybe it will. Mainly though I don't want to take the chance that any dodgy hardware on his end possibly damaging my GPU.

I will stress the cpu as a next port of call using aida64, how long do we think I should run it for?

Will also try different storage setups as he always has uplay on his ssd along with windows but the actual games on the hdd, I'll put them all on the hdd and see what occurs. Will also try no uplay or ubisoft games installed at all and get him to play other stuff for a few days.

I've not got any idea about Linux though so that option is above my head.

.G.

.G. wrote: »

Firstly thanks for all the replies. I'm not the only one who would like to find the source of this clearly .

So as mentioned above,

I've tried:-

different ram and have stressed the original ram over night with no issues found
Now have a different mobo installed
Have also taken out both his storage devices and tried two completely different ones to no avail.

I haven't swapped out the gpu or the psu. The Psu is a 550w gold unit from seasonic. Going by online calculators that should be fine for a 3600 and a 1080. It's about a year and a half old I reckon.

I also haven't tried a different gpu as the only other one I have is my 2080ti and I don't think the psu will cope, maybe it will. Mainly though I don't want to take the chance that any dodgy hardware on his end possibly damaging my GPU.

I will stress the cpu as a next port of call using aida64, how long do we think I should run it for?

Will also try different storage setups as he always has uplay on his ssd along with windows but the actual games on the hdd, I'll put them all on the hdd and see what occurs. Will also try no uplay or ubisoft games installed at all and get him to play other stuff for a few days.

I've not got any idea about Linux though so that option is above my head.

Actually he has uplay and the ubi games on the HDD. Windows is on the SSD. Pretty sure we had them all on the SSD during a previous install of Windows and it still crashed but I'll try.

As for aida64. It has options to stress The GPU, Ram and storage devices as well as the CPU, FPU and cache. I'm ticking all those boxes yeah?

H3llR4iser

.G. wrote: »

Firstly thanks for all the replies. I'm not the only one who would like to find the source of this clearly .

So as mentioned above,

I've tried:-

different ram and have stressed the original ram over night with no issues found
Now have a different mobo installed
Have also taken out both his storage devices and tried two completely different ones to no avail.

I haven't swapped out the gpu or the psu. The Psu is a 550w gold unit from seasonic. Going by online calculators that should be fine for a 3600 and a 1080. It's about a year and a half old I reckon.

I also haven't tried a different gpu as the only other one I have is my 2080ti and I don't think the psu will cope, maybe it will. Mainly though I don't want to take the chance that any dodgy hardware on his end possibly damaging my GPU.

I will stress the cpu as a next port of call using aida64, how long do we think I should run it for?

Will also try different storage setups as he always has uplay on his ssd along with windows but the actual games on the hdd, I'll put them all on the hdd and see what occurs. Will also try no uplay or ubisoft games installed at all and get him to play other stuff for a few days.

I've not got any idea about Linux though so that option is above my head.

The PSU should be able to take a 2080TI at stock - my system with a 3900X, a 2070 Super AND a 1070 draws 505W at peak from the wall while EVERYTHING is at maximum usage (rendering using CUDA + CPU). While gaming (only on the 2070, of course) it goes nowhere near that value and hovers around 275W.



HOWEVER... I understand the reluctance to risk a card that costs as much as a decent second hand citycar


Maybe test his card on your system? Not the best of scenarios, but better than nothing...

.G.

His GPU came from my system when I upgraded, the perks he gets from me being a tech head

It was fine when I had it granted that doesn't mean it still is. Stress testing is ongoing right now, hour and a half in with no problems and max temp 78c on the CPU and 75c on the GPU.