Hello community,
Yesterday was an interesting day. And the part of “those 5 minutes before bed, which turned out to be 3 hours” was even more fun.
I’ll try to recall what was happening, hopefully someone will find how A is related to B (because I’m still in that “What The actual Frank Howard?!”).
For a heads-up, the specs are 9900k, MSI z390 meg ace, win10, separate ethernet and sound card, which are sitting close to each other (and the sound card theoretically CAN produce temperature). The system has been a solid zero issues runner for 2+ years now. Only upgraded the cooling and storage.
After watching a video from DazMode about the Heatkiller CPU block I once again returned to mine with that question of “do you really perform correctly”, so I took it for a spin in the Cinebench R20. Although most of the cores barely reached 90, two got to 96C. 5GHz. 9900k. No throttle spotted. Although I do realize that this isn’t great, but at daily it barely goes to 80s.
From there I wanted to see how the overclocking was configured, but was too lazy to reboot, so I went for the Mobo’s software. Didn’t find it, so installed the new “MSI Control Center”. I do love all those “bat file like” console calls blinking along, where you can’t really see what is being called.
No matter. Went for a reboot (at that point I realized that the software is poo and better to go to bios). Mobo stopped at E0 code (first time, and google said that this is something for a general “couldn’t start”). Realized that I had an external drive connected via $10 chinese something something. And I blamed that to be the reason. Turning it + reset did the trick, and the issue went away.
Sooo, after looking through the OC setting in bios (RO mode) I returned to Windows (I did find that OC was in order and didn’t want to touch anything).
There I realized that the Ethernet shows “No Cable”. At first I blamed the router. Rebooted it a few times. Nope. Then I plugged the internet cable directly. Nope again.
Looking at the leds of the card I saw that they were off, and got only a few 0.1 second flashes during boot.
Device manager - device OK. BIOS > Board Explorer - All good.
Safe mode - nope, no cable.
Returned the original MSI Dragon Center (it was almost 2 am, and going to sleep in the middle of such a battle… nah) due to not having a better idea. Nope. Re-enabled the onboard ethernet controller just to be sure that at least something is finding the cable - after installing the drivers all has shown well and I’m using it even now.
At that point I thought “enough” and went to sleep. Made peace with the idea of the card having a sudden heart stroke.
But today I once again plugged the cable. And it works. And now I’m confused.
I crossed out the versions of CPU lines burning out due to overheat or something - ran the R20 a couple of times to see the same good results (4800sh). Ram also was showing up correctly. Port Royal (just in case) - all OK. Plus I have an m.2 sitting on that line (or I would assume), plus the sound card sitting right next (the bottom two slots are sound card and next the ethernet card), and it didn’t show any reason for worry.