I’ve been away from Windows for a while, and happily so, but I needed to boot into Windows for some OS-specific applications.
I’m noticing now that my system seems to be unstable, it can only run for about 3 hours before hard crashing. No BSOD. First time was directly to blank screen on both monitors, second crash was during video playback, secondary monitor turned orange, and primary monitor went blank. Audio played on a ~10ms loop, aka BZZZ sound.
Since I have the Vega FE card, I am wondering if this is video driver related, and also wondering how to check that theory. Currently I’m running it in “Pro” mode, but I’m going to switch to gaming overnight and see if it is still running in the AM.
Additionally, I’ve heard that Microsoft/Intel’s “Fixes” for the Meltdown and spectre vulnerabilities were causing systems to ‘restart’ I’m running X99 Haswell, and it seems that the last BIOS update for my board was in 2016 so I’m doubtful that it is related, but then again who knows what Microsoft has done on their end.
If anyone has any leads or ideas I would greatly appreciate it
Step 1: if you are overclocked on anything, step back to stock clocks.
See if the crashes persist.
If the crashes go away, raise clocks gradually on one thing at a time until the crashes come back. Then you know what is crashing due to overclocks.
Look at the BSODs (if not BSOD, look at the system log after rebooting to see if it reveals anything - even if display dies the kernel may still log something there). Are the messages the same, or random? If they mention the same DLL all the time, then it is likely related to either that driver/component or hardware driven by that driver/component.
If they’re random, its more likely either heat or memory failure related.
2c.
If its a recent version of Windows i’d say that its kinda unlikely (but not impossible) to be video/video driver related as much of the display driver lives in user space now and can be re-started without causing the entire box to crash if the driver fails.
Not impossible tho, but i’d say “unlikely”. But updating the driver, or googling to see if others have issues with that driver version can help rule that out.
Update: It successfully ran for 22 hours on the gaming driver without crashing, so maybe I’ll put it down as an idiopathic crash. Switching back to pro drivers and seeing if that fails again.
