- May 19, 2011
- 17,704
- 9,560
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Spec:
Phenom II X2 550
ASUS M4A78T-E (latest BIOS)
RAM: 2x2GB DDR3-1333 (tried a spare set of known good modules too)
SSD: Tried two (original: Samsung 870 EVO, Samsung 850 PRO)
PSU: Tried two (original: Corsair VX 450, Corsair CX430)
GFX: Tried two (original: GeForce 8400GS, plus onboard graphics)
OS: Win10, multiple clean installs
switched SATA cable going to SSD
This PC belonged to a customer and I built it in 2009. It ran XP flawlessly on a hard drive to my knowledge, then eventually I convinced the customer to upgrade to Win10 along with a memory upgrade and SSD.
I say 'to my knowledge' because the customer isn't a terribly reliable witness IMO, for example they said nothing while the computer was apparently crashing on a daily basis on Win10. Anyway, I think it can be fairly said that ever since the Win10 upgrade this PC has never been right: Multiple BSOD codes such as NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM, MEMORY_MANAGEMENT, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, system freezes, etc. Having said that, I had maintained their computer on XP over the years and I would have noticed at some point if it liked to crash a lot.
I've posted about it before:
TLDR on that thread: event log entries included IO retries to disk which strongly suggested a faulty SSD so I talked to Samsung. They said nah, disable NCQ and you'll be good. That at least got rid of the disk errors from the time(s) I had it in for testing, and what seemed to improve stability further was switching from AHCI to IDE (this happened accidentally, the BIOS resetted itself while the customer had it), and I was at a point with it whereby the BSODs had seemingly stopped, no more freezes, but the Windows install was mangled from all the prior crashes and I couldn't get it working properly (e.g. Windows 'apps' like Calculator wouldn't start, and it couldn't do a Windows feature upgrade without throwing an install error). I took it in again with the plan to do a clean install of Windows, but while I had it in, it froze a couple of times (and one was outside of the Windows install, I think it froze during the first stage of setup before partitioning). I convinced the customer to replace it.
A bit of extra side info: I built several PCs based on this board, I know that it should be able to handle Win10 + SSD + AHCI. They weren't picky about drivers or anything like that either.
So I've started playing with it again in the hope that I'd get to the bottom of what's wrong with it, but as you can see from the spec I've tried switching out a lot of hardware in the hope of narrowing down the issue. It's had multiple runs of Prime95 without issue (max heat option), multiple runs of memtest86 4.3 and 5.01, and the current symptoms are much like what they were, mainly freezes and weird BSODs that point at drivers (SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION, DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION) despite often none being installed; the most recent BSOD (the DPC one) happened today after a clean Win10 install of 1607 without an Internet connection (so no VGA drivers yet, as vanilla an install driver-wise as can be) during an upgrade to 1803 via USB. Before that crash, I gave the PC a good vacuum-clean. The CPU HSF wasn't in a terrible state, but Prime95 would get the CPU going near 70C, so why not give it a good clean.
Personally I think it's time to scrap certainly the board, probably the CPU as well as I can't ever imagine selling a slightly better dual-core to a customer with an Athlon II X2, what's the point in that. I had hoped to get it stable so I could test out my spare 960T processor from another similar-era PC that's no longer stable.
Phenom II X2 550
ASUS M4A78T-E (latest BIOS)
RAM: 2x2GB DDR3-1333 (tried a spare set of known good modules too)
SSD: Tried two (original: Samsung 870 EVO, Samsung 850 PRO)
PSU: Tried two (original: Corsair VX 450, Corsair CX430)
GFX: Tried two (original: GeForce 8400GS, plus onboard graphics)
OS: Win10, multiple clean installs
switched SATA cable going to SSD
This PC belonged to a customer and I built it in 2009. It ran XP flawlessly on a hard drive to my knowledge, then eventually I convinced the customer to upgrade to Win10 along with a memory upgrade and SSD.
I say 'to my knowledge' because the customer isn't a terribly reliable witness IMO, for example they said nothing while the computer was apparently crashing on a daily basis on Win10. Anyway, I think it can be fairly said that ever since the Win10 upgrade this PC has never been right: Multiple BSOD codes such as NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM, MEMORY_MANAGEMENT, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, system freezes, etc. Having said that, I had maintained their computer on XP over the years and I would have noticed at some point if it liked to crash a lot.
I've posted about it before:
I can read an NTFS file system on an SSD with Linux but not Windows
I'm kinda stumped for how to proceed with this one. Windows 10 clean-installed on an SSD (Samsung 860 EVO) ran into problems and automatic repair doesn't fix the problem. Where it really gets interesting is that: 1 - booting from Windows setup media results in one CPU core being saturated...
forums.anandtech.com
TLDR on that thread: event log entries included IO retries to disk which strongly suggested a faulty SSD so I talked to Samsung. They said nah, disable NCQ and you'll be good. That at least got rid of the disk errors from the time(s) I had it in for testing, and what seemed to improve stability further was switching from AHCI to IDE (this happened accidentally, the BIOS resetted itself while the customer had it), and I was at a point with it whereby the BSODs had seemingly stopped, no more freezes, but the Windows install was mangled from all the prior crashes and I couldn't get it working properly (e.g. Windows 'apps' like Calculator wouldn't start, and it couldn't do a Windows feature upgrade without throwing an install error). I took it in again with the plan to do a clean install of Windows, but while I had it in, it froze a couple of times (and one was outside of the Windows install, I think it froze during the first stage of setup before partitioning). I convinced the customer to replace it.
A bit of extra side info: I built several PCs based on this board, I know that it should be able to handle Win10 + SSD + AHCI. They weren't picky about drivers or anything like that either.
So I've started playing with it again in the hope that I'd get to the bottom of what's wrong with it, but as you can see from the spec I've tried switching out a lot of hardware in the hope of narrowing down the issue. It's had multiple runs of Prime95 without issue (max heat option), multiple runs of memtest86 4.3 and 5.01, and the current symptoms are much like what they were, mainly freezes and weird BSODs that point at drivers (SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION, DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION) despite often none being installed; the most recent BSOD (the DPC one) happened today after a clean Win10 install of 1607 without an Internet connection (so no VGA drivers yet, as vanilla an install driver-wise as can be) during an upgrade to 1803 via USB. Before that crash, I gave the PC a good vacuum-clean. The CPU HSF wasn't in a terrible state, but Prime95 would get the CPU going near 70C, so why not give it a good clean.
Personally I think it's time to scrap certainly the board, probably the CPU as well as I can't ever imagine selling a slightly better dual-core to a customer with an Athlon II X2, what's the point in that. I had hoped to get it stable so I could test out my spare 960T processor from another similar-era PC that's no longer stable.