Constant system freeze

[TheNightman]

Hey guys.

Quite new around here and i thought to ask a question in this thread as I'm using an AMD CPU and I couldn't find anything closer related to my issue.

Got a new system couple of weeks back and it keeps freezing randomly for a few seconds and then goes back to normal. This happens in any kind of situation, from gaming, to photoshoping to watching youtube. I've read that some W10 updates might be the reason, why I reset everything and haven't updated since, but it keeps happening.

One very interesting thing, I tried to run Prime95 on Blend to see how my CPU is doing before OCing it, and half a minute it everything froze. No keyboard nor mouse input whatsoever. I have no idea what is causing it. Have you guys encountered anything similar?

The build has the following

Ryzen 5 2600
Coolermaster 120 PRO
B450 Aorus Elite (i believe the mobo could cause some issues because it is a bit subpar)
Team Group 16 gb @2400mhz
ROG STRIX RX 580 8GB OC
Kingston 500 gb SSD
Seasonic Focus Gold 650w PSU
1TB Seagate Barracuda

Cheers lads.

 

[EarthDog]

When it freezes, are you seeing any kind of drive activity (like a drive light on)?

 

[TheNightman]

I'm not sure what you mean by drive light on, but I've noticed the SSD maxing out. Unfortunately I wasnt able to pinpoint the exact process causing the SSD to max out.

 

[EarthDog]

Drive activity light is what blinks when there is HDD/SSD activity, yes.

When you say reset everything, was that a fresh install of Windows 10?

 

[trents]

Drive light=blinking LED on the case the shows drive activity (reading and writing).

Is the CPU or memory overclocked?

 

[TheNightman]

Drive light=blinking LED on the case the shows drive activity (reading and writing).

Is the CPU or memory overclocked?

No. That was the reason I ran Prime95. To check if there are any risks in OC'ing it.

Drive activity light is what blinks when there is HDD/SSD activity, yes.

When you say reset everything, was that a fresh install of Windows 10?

I've used the Reset PC option within Windows Recovery. Wiped the SSD, but I've done the horrible thing of syncing to One Drive and some registry settings as well as some software settings might have been restored from the backup.

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Also, apparently the case doesn't have any drive lights. Or am I blind?

 

[trents]

No. That was the reason I ran Prime95. To check if there are any risks in OC'ing it.



I've used the Reset PC option within Windows Recovery. Wiped the SSD, but I've done the horrible thing of syncing to One Drive and some registry settings as well as some software settings might have been restored from the backup.

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Also, apparently the case doesn't have any drive lights. Or am I blind?

Or maybe you didn't hook up the front panel LED lead for that light to the mobo pin block. Or maybe you got the polarity reversed. A lot of newer laptops have ditched the HD activity LED but all desktop cases I'm aware of still use them.

I wonder if you have a third party program causing this freezing.

 

[TheNightman]

Or maybe you didn't hook up the front panel LED lead for that light to the mobo pin block. Or maybe you got the polarity reversed. A lot of newer laptops have ditched the HD activity LED but all desktop cases I'm aware of still use them.

I wonder if you have a third party program causing this freezing.

The build was pre-assembled by the vendor. The guys seem quite professional as they've done their own stress testing and all the parameters seemed okay at the time. Coincidentally the shop is called Overclockers. That seemed funny when I first stumbled on this forum.

The only apps that I am currently using, aside from the bloatware that Windows 10 comes with, are qBit Torrent (which I've read can cause some issues with the SSD's by maxing it out, but I've excluded this as it happened without the software running), soundcard utility (Creative), f.Lux, PowerIso, Firefox, Ableton and that's about it.

One thing I noticed, on one occasion, where it did freeze for couple of seconds, I was able to pull up Task Manager quickly and saw a malware service maxing out the SSD and I believe it was the windows' own process.

At this point is just bloody frustrating as I'm working, minding my own business and this f***er decides to randomly freeze for few seconds and then go about its business.

 

[JrClocker]

If the SSD is "maxing out" and the system is freezing, this is a sure sign that the SSD is going bad. I had an SSD go bad a while back, and it did the exact same thing.

In the days of mechanical drives, you could hear the "click click click" as the drive tried to read a bad sector.

Reboot into the command prompt (you have to boot into it, you can't do this from the command prompt in Windows):

- chkdsk C: /f /r /x

---> C: is your drive letter when you boot into command prompt (whatever the drive is that is bad)
---> /f tells chkdsk to fix any errors it finds
---> /r tells chkdsk to locate bad sectors and try to recover data
---> /x tells chkdsk to dismount the drive first

If any bad sectors are found on the SSD, then you need to get a new SSD as quickly as possible as the bad sectors will keep coming.

 

[DaveB]

Since you have a Kingston SSD, you could use the Kingston SSD Manager to check it out.

 

[JrClocker]

Since you have a Kingston SSD, you could use the Kingston SSD Manager to check it out.

That's a good idea...but may or may not work.

In my case, it was a Samsung SSD, and Samsung Magician reported no issues but chkdsk took out 5% of the sectors on the disk.

 

[trents]

SSDs don't use sectors do they? Sectors is a platter storage concept. Is chkdsk of any value therefore with an SSD?

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TheNightman, how comfortable are you in working with the hardware for troubleshooting yourself? You bought this system prebuilt so I take it you don't have lot of hands on experience with hardware components. Is the system still under warranty?

Is the CPU cooling fan spinning? It might be a good idea to check the CPU temp with something like HWInfo64. If the CPU is overheating it could be throttling.

 

[JrClocker]

SSDs don't use sectors do they? Sectors is a platter storage concept. Is chkdsk of any value therefore with an SSD?

"Sectors" on an SSD refer to the logical data blocks that must be written to a FLASH memory. When you save 4 bytes of data to a FLASH memory, you have to save the entire data block. The size of this data block varies by FLASH part number. Off the top of my head, the FLASH data block size is 128 bytes in the embedded devices we use at my company.

 

[TheNightman]

SSDs don't use sectors do they? Sectors is a platter storage concept. Is chkdsk of any value therefore with an SSD?

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TheNightman, how comfortable are you in working with the hardware for troubleshooting yourself? You bought this system prebuilt so I take it you don't have lot of hands on experience with hardware components. Is the system still under warranty?

Is the CPU cooling fan spinning? It might be a good idea to check the CPU temp with something like HWInfo64. If the CPU is overheating it could be throttling.

Hi mate,

I'm quite okay to be honest. I studied computer science for 7 years through high school and uni. I haven't been involved in the last 6-7 years due to the fact that I wasn't actively pursuing it, but now I've decided to get back into it.

The reason why I got it prebuilt was because it's through finance, as I didn't dispose of the whole sum in one go and it's quite easy to manage as the finance options have little to no interest rates. Otherwise I would've assembled it myself.

I've succesfully managed to run Prime95 last night with 0 errors.

The SSD utility did not report any erros, so now I'll have to boot into CMD and run the chkdsk and see if anything pops up.

Are Kingston SSD's known for failing so quickly? It's bloody brand new.

 

[trents]

To be honest, Kingston is not a favorite brand name with a lot of USA-based people on this forum, either with regard to their memory products or their storage devices. Kingston products just seem to have more than their share of compatibility issues, particularly with the AMD platform. Yet, I have noticed that a high percentage of our non USA-based forum participants use Kingston products. I think it's partly because some of the "go to" brands that we enthusiasts/DIY'ers here in the USA prefer are not as available in other parts of the world or are considerably more expensive. Kingston, on the other hand, seems to be relatively inexpensive and readily available in many parts of the world.

 

[pgdeaner]

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4026529/windows-10-using-system-file-checker

Have you tried this? I had a similar issue once and this fixed it. I also had that issue on my daughter's PC and it turned out to be malware in I.E. that Malwarebytes was able to remove. Good luck.