- Jan 1, 2011
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Hi all. So I was messing around with a PC I had built for my brother a couple months ago, and had been operating without any issue in that time. I was trying to swap out the stock cooler for another cooler I had lying around. Turned out the other cooler wasn't compatible with the AM4 socket, didn't fit. So I put the stock cooler back on. I had completely disassembled the PC to do this, so I assembled it back together the same as it was before.
Upon reassembling and powering it on, the PC successfully POSTed, though it did give me a new hardware configuration detected message. I booted into Windows and...within 10 seconds, I got the BSOD. Rebooted, same thing. Went into the BIOS and made sure everything was set to the defaults. The PC was consistently BSODing within seconds upon booting into Windows, sometimes before logging in and sometimes after. It even BSODed when booting into safe mode. And the error message was different each time. Sometimes a memory controller error, sometimes an ntfs.sys error, sometimes system service exception. But the crash behavior was consistent.
So for troubleshooting I trying disassembling and reassembling the whole PC again to make sure I hadn't messed up reinstalling anything. Same behavior. Then I took each RAM stick out individually and put the RAM sticks in different slots, to eliminate the chance that a stick had spontaneously gone bad. Same BSOD. Next I swapped out the Ryzen 3600 CPU for a Ryzen 2600 CPU from another PC I had access to. And the PC successfully booted into Windows, appears to be stable and I'm typing this message from that PC.
So...the problem is isolated to the 3600. My immediate thought is that the pins on the 3600 were somehow damaged, but upon inspecting the CPU I don't see any damage. My other thought is that the thermal paste I use somehow got around one of the pins and is causing it not to make full contact with the socket, but I don't see any sign of that either. So...any thoughts on what could be causing this?
The PC in question is not the one in my signature. The relevant specs, aside from the 3600, are as follows:
MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon
2x8 GB Evo Potenza 3200 MHz DDR4 RAM
Gigabyte Radeon RX 580 8 GB
Crucial P1 1 TB NVMe SSD
Powerspec 650w 80+ Bronze PSU
Windows 10 64 Bit Home
All of the parts are no more than a couple months old, they were all bought brand new.
Upon reassembling and powering it on, the PC successfully POSTed, though it did give me a new hardware configuration detected message. I booted into Windows and...within 10 seconds, I got the BSOD. Rebooted, same thing. Went into the BIOS and made sure everything was set to the defaults. The PC was consistently BSODing within seconds upon booting into Windows, sometimes before logging in and sometimes after. It even BSODed when booting into safe mode. And the error message was different each time. Sometimes a memory controller error, sometimes an ntfs.sys error, sometimes system service exception. But the crash behavior was consistent.
So for troubleshooting I trying disassembling and reassembling the whole PC again to make sure I hadn't messed up reinstalling anything. Same behavior. Then I took each RAM stick out individually and put the RAM sticks in different slots, to eliminate the chance that a stick had spontaneously gone bad. Same BSOD. Next I swapped out the Ryzen 3600 CPU for a Ryzen 2600 CPU from another PC I had access to. And the PC successfully booted into Windows, appears to be stable and I'm typing this message from that PC.
So...the problem is isolated to the 3600. My immediate thought is that the pins on the 3600 were somehow damaged, but upon inspecting the CPU I don't see any damage. My other thought is that the thermal paste I use somehow got around one of the pins and is causing it not to make full contact with the socket, but I don't see any sign of that either. So...any thoughts on what could be causing this?
The PC in question is not the one in my signature. The relevant specs, aside from the 3600, are as follows:
MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon
2x8 GB Evo Potenza 3200 MHz DDR4 RAM
Gigabyte Radeon RX 580 8 GB
Crucial P1 1 TB NVMe SSD
Powerspec 650w 80+ Bronze PSU
Windows 10 64 Bit Home
All of the parts are no more than a couple months old, they were all bought brand new.
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