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The frustrating side of PC gaming and I want to be done with it.

KungFucius

King Snowflake
Just curious, have you tried any of the newer BIOSes? If so did the drive work in the other slot before the update? My board had a new BIOS released this month that looks to be a significant update with an AGESA update. It's possible that there is an interaction with the BIOS version and the drive. I have only ever seen new BIOSes fix things, but since they improve performance it is possible that they "find" a weakness in a marginal component.
 

T-Cake

Member
Even though I probably get poorer specs for the same price, this is why I always go to Dell or HP. If something starts going wrong, they can fix the damn thing. I don't have the patience for PC troubleshooting at home after years of doing it as a job. (I picked Dell as we use those machines at work and they still work reliably after years of use.)
 

psorcerer

Banned
Specs:
Asus ROG Strix-E X570
AMD 3900X
Corsair 4 x 8GB 3200 Corsair memory sticks
EVGA Geforce 2080 Ti.
Sabrent M2 SSD 4.0 512 GB
Sabrent M2 SSD 2TB - where I keep most of my games.
Two additional 4TB HDDs.
PSU EVGA
Corsair All-in-one cooler.

I am pretty upset right now, because today I may be finally broken on dealing with PC.
It has become an unresponsive piece of crap and I don't know where to begin as far as diagnosis. There is very little to indicate what is causing the problem. I have been building an using PCs since the late 90s and this is the first time where I am seriously questioning whether it is worth it. PCs and gaming on a PC are wonderful experiences when they work right, but when you are having issues and you can't pinpoint the cause, it just becomes a fucking nightmare.


All of these parts are at least a year old aside from the Sabrent SSD 4.0 which is about 9 months old.

It started a couple of weeks ago with occasional bluescreens (NDU.sys was the primary guilty party) the causes seemed to happen when I was browsing the internet. I tried to find a fix, but searching (NDU.sys) gives you nothing but very generic suggestions and nothing really worked and most are advertisements to download software. There was no repeatable pattern, it just happened randomly with the common factor being the internet browsing. It never happened while gaming, only when browsing the internet. Other issues, are there are times when Windows wouldn't completely load. Many of the startup apps wouldn't complete and sometimes I would have to restart several times to get it to properly load. Most of these have been few and far between, but today I finally decided that I had had enough and decided to wipe my computer clean and do a fresh install. I performed a secure erase and used a brand new Windows install USB. Much to my surprise, not only did it not fix the issues, in many ways things are worse. Mainly because the bluescreen showed up again and now PV randomly hangs and I can't close or start apps. I end up hitting the reset button and from there it takes a couple of minutes to load Windows. There doesn't seem to be a discernible pattern.

Possible culprits that I am open to:
A bad motherboard ethernet port.
A possibly incorrect motherboard setting.
RAM not being compatible - doesn't seem likely since it was fine until a few weeks ago.
My 2TB SSD might be going bad, after the reinstall it was having issues being accessed. I did a secure erase on this and tried to install Origin, but when it started downloading a game, it lead to the system hanging. Not freezing or bluescreening. I will test this more and see if I can repeat the results. I would mention that when I got my 4.0 512 SSD back in November I was using the top M2 drive for my OS SSD and the 2TB was in the bottom M2 drive. However, when I tried to put the new 4.0 SSD in the top M2 drive, it wouldn't work and I ended up having to put it in the bottom M2 and moved the 2TB to the top. Maybe it had something to do with being near the video card.

Alright GAF, please help. I can't figure out anything. I'd like to try and narrow it down.

If I had to make an educated guess, it would be that Windows 10 version 2004 is complete shit and it's just not fully tweaked the way MS expected or hoped.

Ethernet and wifi use different chips and drivers. Have you tried using wifi or ethernet exclusively?
 

Skifi28

Member
I've been building pcs for the past 15 years and I've had plenty of similar experiences that have slowly driven me off the platform as far as serious gaming goes. I find it much more relaxing to keep a modest pc for work/light entertainment and game on an inexpensive Console I can just return and get a new one. I was reluctant at first, but there's no replacing the peace of mind I've found. Best of luck in your predicament.
 

ZZZZ

Member
Good luck, hopefully you can fix whatever your problem is.

Just a reminder that consoles can break too, happened to me 4 times.

Xbox 360 twice (3RL), PS3 once, PS2 once.

Thankfully i had no problems this gen but i barely use consoles anymore, 90% of my gaming is done on PC.
 
when this happen on console what do you do ?
SAV or pay repair shop .
Why is it a problem when it happens on pc ? it's only free if you like DIY and are good at it.
If not it's same as proprietary closed box
If you build a PC buying individual parts, each part will have a warranty, There's no overriding system warranty, though. You have to find out which component is the issue by process of elimination, which is time consuming and can be infuriating.
 

TheSHEEEP

Gold Member
The only time im frustrated you see a windows update.
Yup.
I decreased my frustrated-by-my-OS time by 70-80% after switching to Linux pretty much full time.
Can still play almost everything I'm interested in (praise be Proton, and dual boot for the rest, though that happened the last time many moons ago) and don't have to deal with MS shenanigans.

If you build a PC buying individual parts, each part will have a warranty, There's no overriding system warranty, though. You have to find out which component is the issue by process of elimination, which is time consuming and can be infuriating.
True, but you know that going in.
It very rarely happens that you need to deal with stuff like that (happened to me once in the last 5-6 years), but you always know it might happen.

My solution when it happened was to pay someone else 500€ to deal with it and also upgrade the PSU and motherboard while at it.
 
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T-Cake

Member
Yup.
I decreased my frustrated-by-my-OS time by 70-80% after switching to Linux pretty much full time.
Can still play almost everything I'm interested in (praise be Proton, and dual boot for the rest, though that happened the last time many moons ago) and don't have to deal with MS shenanigans.

Do you have to trade some performance for that though? I'd love to try out Linux gaming but wary that my 1070 would struggle even more.
 

TheContact

Member
My My SSDs are NVME drives. There are no cables involved!

clean contacts of your ram, gpu, and the nvme ssds with isoprobyl, make sure they're seated properly. nvme ssd's are tricky because they can appear to be seated properly but are not (even when you're able to screw it in). update everything you can: bios, chipset, imei etc..

can you post a dxdiag dump? there's usually good info there esp regarding bsod
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Always check the ram first when you get random non repeatable crashes.
I'll echo this as well. Run Memtest. Something you're doing could be spiking and it's only at certain points of usage that shit goes sideways.

RAM is a really odd one in that it causes some really random shit when it goes wrong. I had stuff like Windows updates failing, games crashing at weird random intervals, browsers doing weird things, all stuff that didn't interrelate at all. I honestly can't remember how I got to the RAM testing as a solution but probably I just started pulling shit out at random and waited to see what happened, which of course meant giving it about an hour of testing if it didn't crash instantly to ensure that my fix had actually worked (the problem with random failures is their random nature, you never truly know that you've fixed them until you've run the fix for a good few days).

I'm glad to have my BIG BEAST MOTHERFUCKER SIMRACING VR BEAST CUNTYBASTARD PC back up and running.
 

BlackTron

Member
If I did all my gaming on PC, I would probably be frustrated as all hell. I would want better hardware, need to suffer all the updates to play new games, and introduce countless additional variables (AKA chances for something to go wrong). I see people pivoting between different game ecosystems, I don't see why not to take advantage of the benefits of each.

I personally keep PC gaming easy by not asking anything extreme of it. It's just my platform of choice for FPS and RTS games, and happens to have seemingly endless cheap/free smaller titles. All of which you can play aplenty without dealing with Windows 10 and burning through expensive graphics cards.

My old system with a GTX 1060 plays the games I really like at good settings without getting too hot or trying overly hard, I'm not asking for Witcher 3 at 4k. For such big ass games I'll simplify my life and grab a game console, I keep PC in its place for playing stuff like Starcraft, Overwatch, Doom or PSO.

I still use Windows 7 -I was worried about having to use 10 to play Halo Infinite, but that game has a ways to go before it proves worthy of more PC headaches.

TBH I would rather have a $400 game console and a $600 PC than a $1000 PC alone.
 

Terce

Member
Off the top of my head, you don't mention the wattage on the PSU so that could be straining to keep up, and your SSD's sound like cheap amazon sale crap. You should have a dedicated SSD of no more than 128Gb for your OS, then use as many additional HDD/SSD's as you want as auxiliary drives. Buy a reputable brand and spend the extra money, no point in blowing everything on a 2080 if the rest of your components are trash.

I'd probably also pick up some new SATA cables as well, a lot of the times the ones that are included with drives / MOBO's are junk and end up failing within a year. As one of the first posts also mentioned, you can very easily pay a professional $100 to tell you exactly is wrong and help fix it.
 
Imo, most PC problems are usually Windows problems. ( :messenger_heart: Linux.) But even those that aren't are not enough to ever cause me to abandon the best way to game out there.

All problems are fixable - and *usually* quick fixes.
 

#Phonepunk#

Banned
thoughts and prayers OP

as a PC gamer i have definitely been there. sometimes on launch day the game is constantly crashing, or controllers don't work, or something similar. it's not easy.

good luck hope you get it figured out soon!
 

Ascend

Member
The 4.0 drive should in theory work in either slot. In slot 1 it uses bandwidth provided by the CPU and in slot 2 it uses bandwidth provided by the chipset.
This. It either means that the lanes from the slot to the CPU are faulty, or that the actual CPU is faulty. I'm betting on the latter, because the 3.0 drive works fine, meaning the lanes are fine. The additional bandwidth that should be provided cannot be handled by the CPU it seems.
Another option is that for whatever reason, not enough power is provided to run in 4.0 mode.

When it's in slot 1 make sure the m.2 slot is set as 4.0 in the bios, it might have been set as 3.0 if you had previously put a 3.0 drive in that slot.
Unless it is a BIOS bug, it shouldn't be a problem. 4.0 NVMe drives should work in a 3.0 slot configuration.
 
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JOEVIAL

Has a voluptuous plastic labia
Others are trying to help you solve your issues which is great! (GAF is great.... when it's great)

But yeah... I echo your thoughts OP. I started as a PC gamer back in the late 90's and have seen 2 computers legitimately explode. It sucks.

- First time was 2000. My brother and I were playing Lego Island on my family's Compaq Presario when all of a sudden the disc drive went into overdrive and took off like a jet engine. It blew the disc up, shredded the motherboard and everything enderneath it... my brother and I were lucky we didn't get any compact disc shrapnel lodged in our foreheads. I still totally think it was the Brickster to this day and I still feel sad that our beloved Lego Island disc passed away in this horrible accident.

- Second time was just a few years ago, in 2016. I was rendering out an Adobe Premiere project on my custom rig when all of a sudden my liquid cooler exploded right on top of the processor and just completed fried every last component in my system. I wasn't even overclocking, and temps always ran super cool. Yes probably just a fluke and bit of bad luck, but still sucks all the same.

Going through all the troubleshooting, installing, and general frustrations that PC's can so generously provide made me become more of a console gamer back in the day. I still game on PC though to get my strategy, and classic FPS fix.
 

EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
As much as PC gaming get's praised gamers realize how many outbreaks in parts happen and it's remarkable when everything works.
 

SmokSmog

Member
Bro, go to the bios and give your 3900x some more juice, add +25mv offset to core voltage you can add to memory controller too

You said it's bluescreen when idle, it's your CPU, I'm 90% sure
 

JCK75

Member
When blue screens start happening out of nowhere I typically start with temperatures, then do tests on RAM and Hard-drive.
most commonly it's a bad stick of RAM, but in your case it is making me think the SSD is bad.
If you don't have the Sabrent control panel installed you might want to do that as it will show the health of the drive and also show if there is a firmware update that may help.
 

RedVIper

Banned
If you build a PC buying individual parts, each part will have a warranty, There's no overriding system warranty, though. You have to find out which component is the issue by process of elimination, which is time consuming and can be infuriating.

It's usually pretty easy to find which component is messing up your system.
 

Rikoi

Member
Never got a blue screen in almost 10 years.
Troubles can happen on PC but on consoles too, which are also harder to fix.
 

ultrazilla

Member
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a bad Windows 10 update. Windows has fucked me up a few times in the last year with their updates not playing nice with my
computer. Best of luck.

a90zg0q.png
 

JohnnyFootball

GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
And at the end of the day, you're paying someone to perform pretty much the same troubleshooting you've tried at home first. Still no guarantee it will be successfully fixed, as in my case.
The only advantage a shop might have is that they will likely have test parts and RAM lying around to test and put in the system.

Not going to them. They charge out the ass and they are known to scam people.
 

JohnnyFootball

GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
The 4.0 drive should in theory work in either slot. In slot 1 it uses bandwidth provided by the CPU and in slot 2 it uses bandwidth provided by the chipset.

When it's in slot 1 make sure the m.2 slot is set as 4.0 in the bios, it might have been set as 3.0 if you had previously put a 3.0 drive in that slot.

With the 2tb drive has it ever previously had a Windows install on it? If so that can sometimes cause conflicts if the boot partition is still hanging around on the drive. Next time you have it hooked up check the drive has just a single partition in disk manager.

If it's not been used as a boot drive before then I'd guess it's a bad power connection to the drive or a bad sata cable.

Last resort, back up your data from that drive wipe the drive clean using disk manager and assign a new letter for the drive.

Worst case scenario - the drive is on its way out. Try getting a USB enclosure for it and trying it on a different system to see if it shows up and causes the same issues.
Yes, that is the weird issue. I am wondering if I need to manually set the PCI Express bandwidth to 4.0 instead of the Auto settings.
Triple check these things. There are some specifics with that Mobo and m2.


yO4AXIM.jpg
Yep, I had the same configuration as the Single VGA/PCIe card. Although I never tried manually setting the PCI-Express speeds in the BIOS.
 
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Siri

Banned
There is no force in heaven or hell that will ever get me to take it to a PC shop. They charge out the ass and are seldom honest.

I’d rather RMA every single piece than trust a PC shop.

About six years ago I took a 14 month old PC that cost me 4K to a computer shop because of a burnt out motherboard. The motherboard was proprietary and the guys in the store said they couldn’t fix it, but they did offer me $800 for the ‘scrap parts’.

I was so angry I couldn’t even speak. I bought a replacement motherboard on e-bay and swapped it with the old one. It was easy.

The guys who run PC stores really do prey upon technically inept people. It’s not good to support them.
 
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JohnnyFootball

GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
For the rest of the day, unless Sabrent or Asus get back with me with some solutions, I am going to keep my M2_1: Samsung 250GB (OS drive) / M2_2: Sabrent 512GB-PCI4.0 setup going and I will see how this works. If this works and doesn't have issues, then it will mostly prove that the 2TB was the culprit.

The Sabrent 512GB not working in slot 1 is an annoying issue, but one that I dont have to solve at this moment.

Right now, my OS is running on version 1903. I am hesitant to run it on 2004.
 
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Kenpachii

Member
If the OP wants to try and solve this for himself and learn about his system then let him.

Taking it to a PC shop should be the last port of call in such a scenario.

If he wanted to take it to a PC shop instead of trying to solve it himself he would have already.

Also some PC shops will try and screw you over.

Jup like those PC shops are going to test memory for you lol nope. They will just say its fucked and replace it even if ti fixes your issue or not. They don't give 2 shits. U are better of trying to figure it out yourself and learn in the process.
 
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GHG

Gold Member
Yes, that is the weird issue. I am wondering if I need to manually set the PCI Express bandwidth to 4.0 instead of the Auto settings.

Yep, I had the same configuration as the Single VGA/PCIe card. Although I never tried manually setting the PCI-Express speeds in the BIOS.

Yeh try setting it manually and see how it goes.

Another thing you could try is setting the top pcie slot to pcie 3.0 x16 (or pcie 4.0 x8 if your bios allows you to). No graphics card on the market will saturate the bandwidth available with either of those settings so it will have no negative impact on performance. The top pcie slot on x570 motherboards shares the bandwidth provided by the CPU with the top m.2 slot, but both should be able to run at full speed 4.0 no problem.

If the 4.0 m.2 works with that configuration then it will mean 100% there is an issue with the bandwidth coming from the CPU.
 

Miyazaki’s Slave

Gold Member
I came here to say this lol
The only advantage a shop might have is that they will likely have test parts and RAM lying around to test and put in the system.

Not going to them. They charge out the ass and they are known to scam people.

Having a lot of spare parts (like an extra PSU and an extra CPU fan assembly) would help you right now, and a testing bench can do wonders for quickly eliminating hardware as a culprit.

You are running a variety of parts in this rig. You have (if I understand your specs) 3 different storage form factors (NVMe, SSD, and Tradtional Sata hard drives), a power hungry video card, and a cooling system. Your mother board also has ports that you probably are not using; turn all that stuff off in bios. If you use usb audio devices then disable all the audio hardware in bios, same thing with the display and HDMI ports on the Mobo. If you are not using both network ports, disable the one you are not using and remove the drivers.

You also have a usb 3.2 (type c) port on that mother board. If possible remove the platter drives and get external storage if you are using those internal drives for storage only (assumption here is you are NOT doing media creation on this device and you don't need HUGE page files/scratch discs for Adobe or Autodesk).

I don't know what you are going to get from this thread outside of a bunch of random troubleshooting ideas that may cause more frustration than actually lead you to salvation, just my .02 (wait...I am paying you now.....perhaps WE are the ones that are being of the scam).
 

Kenpachii

Member
He just needs to strip his PC and bench all parts basically. It's not that hard. Takes him a day with testing and done he is. I and people already explained this multiple times so its straight up now just his own effort here.

PC shops are a bad idea because they need money to survive. They won't test your PC for days on end to see if your CPU and motherboard and memory is stable and charge u a fortune for it. They will spend a hour tops at your PC and that's about it.

If thing is unstable they will disconnect everything, and see if its stable, if not they replace the memory or put it in different slots ( new memory and see if its stable ). If not they replace the motherboard entirely and see if it fixes, if not PSU is next. Boom problem solved.

If all of that worked fine anyway, they will connect part for part and replace whatever gives issue's to see if its the motherboard or the part itself and even test that part in another box by trying to run it to just be sure.

I did this shit for years on end in a PC shop when i was a student fixing problems for people. 1 hour is the limit because people aint paying 2 hours labor. Stress tests and benchmarks are useless simple because it takes time and are only useful when u don't have spare parts and even then they are not reliable.

Time is money.

If the PC would come back and keep having issue's, next part will be replaced and done.
 
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Estocolmo

Member
Dude you can't do that to me, I've just made up my mind building a new PC :messenger_tears_of_joy:

I'd be interested in more details from you regarding the changes. Is there something you miss besides AOE from the PC space? Are there some things you dislike about consoles? Would you say everyone should do this, or is there a list of prerequisites one has to match in order to enjoy what you're doing?

Sorry for the late answer.

Ye, AoE is the only thing I miss from PC.
And now that Microsoft enabled keyboard+mouse support on Xbox One, there is nothing stopping AoE from being released on Xbox.
All other games I do on my Xbox One and N3DS. Or it could be the PS4 or Switch in there aswell, so many good games on all current consoles.

The point is I have no reason to own a PC.
I got extremely tired back then of having to be a "mechanic" to the constants PC-issues.
I had no more energy left in having to solve PC-issues.

Like someone said, things have changed a lot since 2009 and today.
But some problems seem to still be present like in 2009. Virus protection popups, Wifi connecting problems, sudden crashes, missing certain software to run certain programs, programs just refuse to work, and most importantly I dont need to buy hardware to "keep up" every 2 years!
Ive had 2 Macs since 2009 (MacBook Pro 2009 and MacBook Air 2015), and two consoles since 2005 (Xbox 360 and Xbox One).

Sorry for writing like this, english is not my native language but I hope you understand me!
 

MH3M3D

Member
The struggle is real sometimes. The rig Im using right now was a nightmare in the beginning too. But that sweet sensation when it all comes together... Keeps us nerds coming back for more.
 

The_Mike

I cry about SonyGaf from my chair in Redmond, WA
I don't want to be "that guy", but I've never had all these issues as a pc gamer through my twenty four years as a pc gamer.

But I also never buy amd, which I suspect is somehow linked to these bad experiences.
 
Sorry for writing like this, english is not my native language but I hope you understand me!

Perfectly fine, thanks for your answer. You got me thinking again. I guess it's much more sensible financially to do it your way. I own a portable Mac too and prefer the OS to something like Windows. I do basically everything on it, mainly programming. It'd be a pretty big pile of money for me just for a PC that's supposed to do nothing but play games (I'd use the Mac for everything else), and will be obsolete after 2 years tops as you've said. Anyways, thanks for your input!
 

Kev Kev

Member
i should have been a pc gamer

i grew up gaming on pc's, even preferred them. in high school and the years after i was on my PC all the time. even helped build a custom pc that was fun for a while. and i there were pc games i really, really wanted to play thrugh out the years. but every-time i tried to install something id have prbems, then if i was able to get it installed id run into problems launching it, then if i got it to launch i ran into problems getting it to run smooth and look right, and on and on and on... im not sure i ever got more than half a dozen games i wanted to play to work. i usually wound up giving up and just wasted my time and money. it was infuriating.

hell i just downloaded steam and shining force 2 on my mac, figuring, hey this mac has over 15 years on this game (age wise), there is no way it cant play an old ass sega game like SF2... wrong... it wouldn't run right and i deleted it immediately. my phone has zero problems running sega classic games but my god damn desktop can't... nope, fuck it, im out

im basically the OP, except i gave up on PC's 15-20 years ago. youre right op, its not worth it. switch to console.
 
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kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
I don't want to be "that guy", but I've never had all these issues as a pc gamer through my twenty four years as a pc gamer.

But I also never buy amd, which I suspect is somehow linked to these bad experiences.

I never bought AMD myself, Intel Inside only and I had two PC builds that were prone to random crashes. In both cases I had to buy another $200 motherboard to get the PC working in good order again. Because those BSODs occurred completely out of the blue, there was no way to trigger the crashes and find the culprit by way of elimination. Every few nights I would have a crash and then spend the rest of the evening removing RAM modules, reattaching cables, updating drivers, resetting BIOS settings, reviewing BSOD event logs, etc etc. In each case It took weeks before I was sure the motherboard was to blame. Thank god my current PC is 1000% stable and reliable.
 
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